Yahoo Mail launched an application platform, that allows developers to build application for Yahoo Mail, as part of Yahoo Open Strategy. Today Yahoo Mail team announced a feature dubbed as smarter inbox which shows messages, information and activity updates from your close network and an updated inbox and folder view that filters messages from your personal connections.
The application platform is not completely open yet, as of now only three apps are available in this release including Flixster, WordPress and Xoopit. The beta testing of this smarter inbox began today with a limited group of Yahoo Mail power users in the US. This functionality will be released worldwide in 2009 according to Yahoo Developer Network Blog, excerpts below.
With a highly engaged and active audience of hundreds of millions of users around the world, the opportunity to create innovative applications that drive traffic back to your site and increase user engagement with your services is huge. Because of the sensitivity of the information in people’s inboxes, we’re adding developers gradually while we refine the application security and privacy protections our Yahoo! Mail users demand.
To create applications for Yahoo! Mail, developers will be using the Yahoo! Application Platform to build, test, and submit their apps. Developers will be able to embed a JavaScript application inside an iframe running in the all-new Yahoo! Mail. These apps can then interact with the Mail container—and do things like register a callback when a message is dragged-and-dropped onto your app, pop open a new Compose tab with app-generated content, or fetch social data from around the Yahoo! network through YQL—using the JS APIs we provide.
Developer documentation shows screenshots of Flickr integration with in Yahoo Mail, i guess this will allow users to email or share Flickr pics directly from yahoo mail. I think this is going to be big, Yahoo Mail has big chunk of web mail users and if they can engage these users it can generate some extra revenue. See the video for the new features at the end of this post.
Apart from Yahoo Mail updates, Webware is reporting there are other announcements like the ability to customize home page and My Yahoo by adding applications to it. You know My Yahoo is still leading start page space. A new toolbar that gets drop-down and shows your friends activity and emails you received etc.
[…] last December Yahoo announced an application platform for developers that allows anyone to build applications for Yahoo Mail. At that time there are only […]