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