Yahoo! Mail, Messenger get a facelift

MANILA, Philippines - Give it to the e-mail, the world’s first killer app, to survive the lightning-fast realignments and innovations in our digital planet. It’s still here and very much part of our communication paradigm despite newer forms of connectivity in the social space.

Give it to Yahoo! Mail to reinvent itself for optimal use in our ever-growing social universe. Thirteen years or so after it was first introduced, its user base is still growing  273 million users worldwide, 16 million of that in Southeast Asia and 3.5 million in the Philippines, according to ComScore’s last count.

It has its reasons for being then and now but a makeover is probably the first thing it needs to stay relevant.

“Our vision (for Yahoo! Mail and Messenger) is (for it) to be at the center of people’s online lives,” Isaac Souweine, product marketing manager of Yahoo! Southeast Asia, said in a recent media forum. These two products are absolutely central to what people are doing online and we hope to deliver that vision.”

The current versions of Yahoo! Mail  the classic mail and the new mail (with a slightly updated interface)  do not integrate contacts from the popular networking sites Facebook and Twitter. These new messaging systems, being the rage of most online users nowadays, are central to the Yahoo! Mail and Messenger redesigns, said Souweine.

“One thing that we think as the future of e-mail is integrating contacts from social networks,” he said. “You can now consume your Twitter feeds, your Facebook feeds within the e-mail interface and you can also push out content to those sites. You can update your Facebook status, you can comment on other people’s status, update your own status or re-tweet messages.”

“Because the social Web is important for our users, we want to make it easy for those users to either consume those content while they are on Yahoo! or push content from the Yahoo! site onto those networks,” he added.

The same holds true for the Yahoo! Messenger beta. When a user opts to link his or her YM to Twitter and Facebook accounts, the feeds are shown right up there on the YM box. No need to open a browser or many browser tabs to get updates from the two sites.

Incidentally, Jack Madrid, Yahoo! Philippines general manager, disclosed that the Philippines is the only country that calls the IM (or instant messaging) YM, which he said is proof of the prevalence of Yahoo! Messenger in the Philippines.

Another innovation

Another innovation of the Yahoo! Mail beta is inline photo and video viewing. This allows people to view photos and videos from sites like Flickr, Picasa or YouTube right within their e-mail messages.

But what Yahoo! seeks to achieve in undergoing this massive facelift for two of its most popular products is to focus on the basics  speed, spam protection, and storage.

“Speed is important no matter what country you live in but it is especially important in countries like the Philippines where network connectivity is not always fast,” said Souweine, adding that the beta is now two times faster. It also now has unlimited storage.

“That means unlimited files in your e-mail. Whatever you want to keep, you can keep it there. That is something unique to Yahoo! among the e-mail providers,” Souweine stressed.

Corollary to speed and unlimited archiving is a better spam protection and a smarter search mechanism within the mail box. When you have thousands of files in your Inbox and Outbox, you need to be able to locate e-Mails quickly, and receive only the e-mails you want or choose to receive.

“We built this from the ground up, we rebuilt the entire code base,” Souweine said. “And the reason we did that is because we could not get the features we wanted so we started over and made a huge commitment in terms of time and resources.”

Understandably, this new mail platform is meant to eventually replace the two current Yahoo! Mail versions. In the meantime, Yahoo! is also taking Mail and Messenger forward by making them available on all mobile devices, making sure that in whatever device users are accessing them, they have the same look and feel.

“We all want them to work seamlessly and you would not even notice that you are moving back and forth between platforms. We know that the future of Internet access is very much tied to the mobile handset,” Souweine said.

This means making games available also mobile, right there on the Yahoo! Messenger box.

“Gaming is huge, not just in Southeast Asia but all over the world, whether it’s social games or hardcore games. What you usually do is open another browser to play games or download something. What we did was include games in Messenger,” Karen Yeo, product marketing manager of Yahoo! Southeast Asia.

So if you feel like playing Fishville or Grepolis on the spur of the moment, you will have it right there on your YM; it’s fast, fun, fungible.