Giving you the personal touch

Posted December 15th, 2008 at 1:03 pm by Ash Patel, Audience Products Division

 24 Comments / Filed in: Trends & News

There’s no question that the Internet has made life more productive and helped people do a better job of staying connected. But sometimes it feels more curse than blessing when you’re dealing with inbox overload (relevant fact = 100 billion email messages are sent every day!), unwieldy amounts of social connections, and the growing number of websites you have to visit to get things done. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about technologies that can ease the pain while also helping you do more things at once.

Today we’re beginning to roll out what we’re calling a “smarter inbox,” a more open and social Yahoo! Mail helps you better keep up with the information and people you care about most. The new Welcome Page surfaces messages based on people who are most relevant to you, letting you designate your preferred connections and automatically prioritizing messages so you see theirs first. We’ll also suggest more connections to you based on the people you already know.

Also, based on our new universal profile service, we let you see your connections’ activity updates across Yahoo!, such as the stories they’ve buzzed, the hotels they’ve reviewed on Yahoo! Travel, or shows they’ve rated on Yahoo! TV. In the future, those updates will come from things people are doing across the Web outside of Yahoo!. People today are communicating and connecting with others in various ways, from email, to blogs, to real-time messages. The Updates feature brings together these web activities together in one place to allow you to stay up to speed on a range of your connections’ activities and interests.

We’re also letting you do more in your e-mail experience by bringing third-party applications into Yahoo! Mail – a tremendous milestone for us. We’re just beginning a limited beta test, starting with applications like Flixter (share movie time, trailers and reviews), WordPress (post photos and links to a blog from your inbox), Xoopit (see and share all the photos stored in e-mail, including attachments and links to photo sharing sites, in one organized and consolidated “photo view” of the inbox.), and Yahoo! services like Flickr and Yahoo! Greetings – letting you get a lot more done from within your inbox. We expect developers from the Web’s top brands to build apps that we can integrate next year. Call it our new open way of life – unlocking popular Yahoo! products and letting outside developers create great new experiences for our users.

We are rolling out our smarter inbox in a phased process. Select Yahoo! Mail users in the U.S. and Australia will start seeing the new Welcome Page with messages from their connections, starting today. A more limited group of users in the U.S. will begin beta testing the open applications today. We plan to merge the social and open features into one Yahoo! Mail experience in the first half of 2009. You can read more on our Yahoo! Mail blog.

We’ve also made enhancements to My Yahoo! and the Yahoo! Toolbar to help you get more done. Starting today, you’ll be able to add third-party apps to your My Yahoo! homepage, beginning with a limited selection – like a calorie counter and apps that lets you fuel your addiction to “The Office” and “Heroes” — with more to come as developers explore our Yahoo! Application Platform. Read more on our Yahoo! Developer Network blog and the My Yahoo! blog. And we’re offering a sneak preview later this week of a new Yahoo! Toolbar (Windows IE only for now) that features the same apps we’re testing on our new homepage– you can check for email from Yahoo! and other popular e-mail providers, monitor and search for eBay items, and find local movie showtimes. You’ll also get personal search suggestions and be alerted when one of your connections has an activity update.

All this is part of our new Yahoo! Open Strategy, a major undertaking that opens Yahoo! to the creativity and innovation of outside developers and publishers like never before, while unlocking the latent social network that exists on Yahoo!. This is really just the beginning of what we have planned as we put you at the center of the best of the Web, wherever that may be.

Ash Patel
Executive Vice President, Audience Product Division

Tagged: news. my yahoo!, yahoo! mail, yahoo! open strategy, yahoo! toolbar, YOS

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24 Comments Add your own

Jen | December 15th, 2008 at 2:21 pm

iam so excited for this i cannot wait yahoo is so awesome im so stoked you will be better than myspace

Walter | December 15th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

How do I opt OUT of the new interface? All I want is a clean interface to read my email, not make social connections. If I wanted facebook, twitter, myspace or other similar functionality, I WOULD JOIN THOSE SITES.

On my system, it seems to be taking much longer to switch folders and view my email. Is this a function of an the new system? I have a Pentium 3 computer running at 750MHz with 512 MB of memory. I am using Windows 2000 service pack 4 with the latest critical updates from Microsoft. I am using Firefox 2.0 as my browser.

GuillaumeB | December 15th, 2008 at 4:04 pm

ooks very interesting and Yang’s Live concept inally comes true. It ’s not set up yet in my account though. I keep trying to refresh

Dan | December 15th, 2008 at 5:16 pm

Just like Detroit, you’re adding features nobody wants. Who said I wanted a digital speedometer?? I sure don’t want to pay to fix it, or drown in a flood because the stupid electric windows won’t open. I use Google for my home page because it loads faster than anything else I know and is often useful. I liked Yahoo email circa 2005 C.E. I really don’t want or need this other stuff from Yahoo — if I want those things, I go to the source, not to a provider. I still haven’t adapted the new email I/F offered two years back. I won’t adapt this either.

Felix | December 16th, 2008 at 1:34 am

How do I turn it off?

I dont want to see what other people are doing, I don’t want them to see what I am doing, I don’t want a Universal Profile (I have different email addresses for a reason).

Yet another example of having committee designed cruft forced on us so Yahoo can play buzzword bingo

Goodbye from yet another alienated Yahoo ex-user

gag | December 16th, 2008 at 2:44 am

we are in sync, i had mentioned this and the importance of profiles in the past
i keep talking about the importance of intelligent IVR

anyways
this is interesting coz mail box is moving towards being browsers and shared browsers

i cant wait for the day when the mail box would be desktop and shared desktop

the only worry right now is people who still are on narrowband and with slow computers, also mail box being cluttered with features and advertisements.

Right now yahoo! seems to be doing well with this mailbox, but its a fluid and dynamic environment

mail still is about writing something and sharing but your new mail is also about sharing activities and connections. Further we could add a app which when clicked for compose and option selected for action and sent to a user eliminates the need to write something. This app then performs certain tasks automatically at the receivers end, here the user does not type any mail message at all
EX: compose->choose radio button options, like view flicker, share blog posts, share calender event or upcoming, etc., and send to receiver. The receiver clicks on activate mail and all this information is updated for receiver.

———————————-
yahoo! toolbar could have been unique and well done, its ok ,i am not impressed

it is tough to think of something when you dont know what coding is being done, i wish i could work for yahoo! i like giving ideas, i would love to come up with something new for search, well talk to me, mail me

gag | December 16th, 2008 at 3:28 am

if their are too many mails in a mail box then the user can be offered a scroll view where the user can view mails by size or date etcs.,
also for people with too many emails, old mails can me shown again on days when the new one received is less then a Number with a icon indicating as old mails

EX: Thursday new mails received is 10 while normally its 40 hence that day old mails as set by user (by name/date/bytes) is displayed with a icon indicating they are old mails.

gag | December 16th, 2008 at 6:24 am

for users getting 1000+ mails we can have a value column where each type of mail has a value from 0-5 like mails with attachment has value 3 while, mail which is only for receiver is value 1 while mail with lots of cc is value 4 while mail with more data/bytes is value 3 while mail with spammy content is value 5 and the user can sort the column by value

for users getting 1000+ mails can we provide post-it for individual mails so when they search back to the mail after a month, they can quickly understand the content of the mail

Sarah | December 16th, 2008 at 10:29 am

regarding these new pages/interfaces… why? Why do you insist on forcing people to change to these new more complex foreign pages. People, like myself, use Yahoo services because they are easy and quick and familiar… yet when you burden us down with unfamiliar and new pages that are completely different… it just wedges us out. I saw this happen with the Yahoo Maps system. I LOVED the old dial up version and often when accessing it after the switch, I clicked “use old dial up version” and loved it, and now that feature of choosing the old is gone. So, you’ve eliminated my use of the yahoo maps. The new system doesn’t work well at all. If I wanted the complexity and annoyance of MapQuest, I’d have gone there… same with this new home page. why, when I type in yahoo.com do I go to m.yahoo.com… I don’t want a my yahoo webpage, if I did, I’d have signed up for that long ago… I understand keeping new things in the works for customers, but what you’ve done is forced everyone to change. Why not allow people the options choice of keeping the old. OR, even better, just leaving everything as it is… since ‘why keep forcing what isn’t broke’???

Frustrated VERY long time customer…

Jorge | December 16th, 2008 at 10:57 am

I think it could be a great application, but, is’t in spanish?

Nicki Dugan | December 16th, 2008 at 2:34 pm

@jorge - Initial availability for the new Yahoo! Mail features will be in the US and Australia. Spanish to come!

jeff forbes | December 16th, 2008 at 10:41 pm

It makes me wonder when Google is going to start law suits for stealing the basic format for G-Mail for your new “smarter inbox”.And once more Yahoo seeks to copy what others do,rather than be the innovators they claim to be.

Also as usual you do not address what so many Yahoo users want to know about.The fate of what used to be the most original social network on the web.Yahoo 360!!
Are you or are you not going to repair it and return it to Yahoo’s community of services!!If not.Just TELL US!!,so we can close out our profiles so we can with the friends we’ve made go some where else!!

Nath | December 17th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

I agree with the commenters who said to LEAVE IT ALONE or at least leave us the option to still use Yahoo Classic. I don’t want to join a social network, I don’t want to see where people have been or for people to see where I have been. I have been using Yahoo for many years, and I find it superior to to Google. I also got very annoyed with the change to Yahoo Maps and TV listings, both of which were easy to view and use.
There’s nothing wrong with trying to attract new customers, but don’t forget about those of us who want to keep using the Classic versions of your services.

mal_igned | December 22nd, 2008 at 10:35 am

More like giving us the finger.

Ron Bailey | December 25th, 2008 at 10:23 am

Sounds nice. I’d try it, except a lot of the people in my contacts don’t know they’re in my contacts ^_^

Floyd | December 31st, 2008 at 10:24 am

I tried it, I hate it.

A) I left YMail along time ago. I keep an account to use for signing up for services that will probably spam me with useless offers and update info. So its not a huge deal to me that you messed with tradition and success again for the sake of some idea that your innovation will somehow be widely applauded with no evidence whatsoever to base that idea on. Nothing new for me with Yahoo there, which is why I left YMail. Still, I feel compelled to tell a formerly constantly used service why I left and where I think they are making mistakes in the vain hope someone in there will get it.

B) What was so wrong with the ‘old school’ e-mail interface? Maybe *your* inboxes are overloaded there in silicon valley at Yahoo headquarters, but mine’s just fine. I don’t use e-mail as a social networking resource, and I don’t expect to ever. Not only are there better more well established services that have messenger capabilities that work just fine, but e-mail is just psychologically different. I go there to read and reply to e-mails. I don’t go for ads, I don’t go to spy on my friends activities. I go to do e-mail. Blending e-mail and social networking is just plain silly, in my view. Its gadgetry where I don’t want it. When I do e-mail, that’s all I want to do there.

Also, the idea that my inbox will be deciding who I want to hear from is straight up madness. I turn off those little assistant things in MS Office too. I hate, absolutely HATE when a computer tries to think for me. Yahoo, in my experience, is terrible at designing thinking software also. Take your automated ‘help pages’ for an example. They suck! I’m not inclined to let you manage my inbox for me.

Here’s the solution: Let me set the priority.

There may be people I want to hear from right away, but that I never hear from for months. Meanwhile I get 220 nonsensical jibberjabbering ones from people I could care less about, but talk to all the time about trivia.

Yeah, I saw the video about Jerry’s presentation, and I gotta say it just doesn’t grab me as usable to me.

It sounds awesome for people who live in a city with each other nearby, and want to stay connected, but that’s who its designed for. You built the bubble YOU wanted, not that the web wanted. You botched the rollout of the core product which was the profiles system (I guess?), and I don’t see much receptiveness out there for it.

Rotsa Ruck. You gonna need it. Well, you need a new strategy, but when the people at the top say jump, I guess the whole company has to heave to. Once committed you are sorta stuck with it I guess. Well, Yahoo is stuck with it, smarter companies would realize their blunders and adjust things a bit. Next time: do some market research! Be Yahoo, not Facebook.

Floyd | December 31st, 2008 at 11:13 am

@Jeff Forbes:

Jeff, Yahoo has already said Yahoo 360 is done, and won’t be supported any more. What you know as 360 now will become part of the gimpy new profile system. Their plan is to use the profile system as the “main” page for your yahoo activities, and it will distribute notifications to all your contacts regarding what Yahoo activities you are doing. Sort of like how MyBlogLog has all its stalkeriffic features, they will now be putting all that into all the Yahoo services. While you don’t have to share your info, I’m sure the default will be “on” as usual.

Yahoo said all this, its just kind of hidden and decentralized. You have to dig a bit.

Fed Up | January 1st, 2009 at 8:56 pm

As part of your “Yahoo! Open Strategy”, when is Yahoo going to get real IMAP instead of having it locked to Zimbra? Because no other email provider I know has IMAP locked to a specific client: GMail doesn’t, AOL doesn’t….

I’ve always considered AOL the “Walmart” of the Internet, but when I see that AOL Mail users get platform-agnostic IMAP, I get upset that Yahoo doesn’t offer anything like that. It’s hard for me to believe that AOL can do that and YMail can’t. Guess I can’t make fun of AOL anymore.

Ron Bailey | January 6th, 2009 at 10:11 am

Give me a break!

I dont want to see what everyone else is doing and I don’t want them to see what I am doing. How do you turn it off?!

Floyd | January 6th, 2009 at 10:49 am

AHA!

There is a way out!

If you don’t like this connections business in your e-mail (and who does, really?) go to your Mail Options link and then General Preferences. Uncheck the Connections Features box and viola, out the window it all goes.

Not one Yahoo staffer has offered this up since the feature was rolled out (that I’ve seen), but some enterprising user figured it out. Your mail at least should look normal afterwards. You still need to go to your profile and set everything to private (which takes some doing, the controls are not all in one location). I think Settings should allow you to control all that, but you’ll need to go to Account info as well I think. Very confusing and invasive.

Bad Yahoo!

some guy | January 8th, 2009 at 11:35 am

Wow, okay, I actually signed up to test this new mail beta thingy, and man the page is really busy. Although it does seem like a kool idea for Yahoo to jump onto the social network bandwagon (I’m still not sure how they plan on pulling it off in the long run), alot of these new additional services are a bit too much even for my taste. But I guess we’ll have to wait and see what Yahoo pulls next out if its hat.

RS | January 9th, 2009 at 2:07 pm

Ash, I liked your cnet interview, you gave the best explanation yet regarding Yahoo’s plans for the future. Too bad no one else could manage one that made as much sense.

However, I was dismayed to learn that the 360 blogs will NOT be migrated to the new profile services, according to Ash Patel, executive vice president of Yahoo’s Audience Product Division. I believe if you look at the messages Mr Warburton has been giving to the 360 community, they probably have the general impression (where they have taken the time to read) that their blogs will be migrated and a blog will be featured in the profiles section. I have a feeling the 360 community doesn’t have an accurate picture on this.

From: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13953_3-10041155-80.html?tag=mncol

“Yahoo is focused on Mail–which has 275 million monthly users, according to Patel–as the core application to wire up with the social APIs. “People have their top 10 to 20 friends they care about. We have to take the latent social stuff, such as the address book with tens of billions of connections, and instant messaging, and buddy lists, and find the top 10 to 20 people who matter to a person,” Patel said. Yahoo is developing a new profile page; Yahoo 360 profiles will be migrated to the new profile pages, and those users will have the option of moving their Yahoo 360 blogs to other blog platforms, such as WordPress and TypePad.”

So Yahoo is not planning on a blog for the profile, it sounds like. Maybe a blog feed at best?

Forget for a moment that users who had multiple profiles were NOT offered the option of choosing which profile was migrated, and that this was not a consistent choice on Yahoo’s part. For some they had their Groups profile defaulted, for some it was 360, for some it was messenger…COMPLETE fail! This just seems like inadequate planning to meet goals. I hope someone can get a handle on what at least several thousand users seem to perceive as having blackened your own eyes here. Stop the bus and proceed only with caution, please!

akyaka otelleri | March 22nd, 2009 at 1:53 pm

How do I opt OUT of the new interface? All I want is a clean interface to read my email, not make social connections. If I wanted facebook, twitter, myspace or other similar functionality, I WOULD JOIN THOSE SITES.

On my system, it seems to be taking much longer to switch folders and view my email. akyaka otelleri Is this a function of an the new system? I have a Pentium 3 computer running at 750MHz with 512 MB of memory. I am using Windows 2000 service pack 4 with the latest critical updates from Microsoft. I am using Firefox 2.0 as my browser.

sikiş | March 22nd, 2009 at 3:34 pm

I agree with the commenters who said to LEAVE IT ALONE or at least leave us the option to still use Yahoo Classic. I don’t want to join a social network, I don’t want to see where people have been or for people to see where I have been. I have been using Yahoo for many years, and I find it superior to to Google. I also got very annoyed with the change to Yahoo Maps and TV listings, both of which were easy to view and use. sikiş
There’s nothing wrong with trying to attract new customers, but don’t forget about those of us who want to keep using the Classic versions of your services.