Over the past few months, Yahoo has been quietly adding more and more features to their webmail solution, Yahoo Mail. For three years (from the sidelines), I’ve been hoping they would do this, and finally it looks like they’re getting the message. Perhaps it’s Carol Bartz’ leadership, I don’t know, but Yahoo is finally polishing and rebuilding the biggest weapon in their arsenal.
In the past few months, Yahoo Mail has added support for large attachments (via Drop.io), added various Facebook-like “apps” from companies like Evite, Flickr, and Paypal, and they acquired Xoopit to improve their photo sharing and sending abilities. They even started allowing Facebook style “status casting” which is equivalent to the Facebook news feed, allowing people to keep track of what their friends and family are up to.
These moves show a new, long-overdue dedication to email. Yahoo has 350 million email users worldwide, and they have finally realized that email is their Trojan horse that will let them cross-promote and upgrade users to all of their other media properties and services. Everyone needs email, and very little innovation has happened in the email space in the last 15 years. If Yahoo can innovate and make social networking and messaging readily accessible and imminently usable for their already enormous audience within an email context, they have a chance to create some major buzz and hold off the Facebooks of the world that are out to eat their lunch. Just imagine if Facebook started offering actual email addresses – Yahoo would face a serious threat. Yahoo already has massive reach, all they need to hold off Facebook are tools that let that massive audience connect with each other.
The biggest question I have is whether it is too late. Gmail was integrated with its IM solution from Day 1, but Yahoo Mail still isn’t well tied to Yahoo Messenger. Why weren’t my Yahoo Messenger contacts automatically added to my Mail address book so I can see my friends updates? This is a huge oversight and has hamstrung adoption of the Yahoo news feeds and status updates, but I’m hopeful Yahoo will move to correct this.
Also interesting is that Yahoo is innovating on its email solution while Google is reinventing email entirely with Google Wave. I haven’t had the chance to say this often, but Yahoo’s approach is right, and Google’s is wrong. Google Wave is too innovative, too paradigm shifting to gain widespread adoption in the next few years, and unfortunately it’s the kind of product that isn’t worth anything until the people you’re communicating with use it too. Yahoo, on the other hand, is innovating on email incrementally, making their interfaces more streamlined, and making ancillary features like attachments and photo sharing more native and intuitive. If Yahoo can get the social piece right, too, they may start grabbing headlines with their features again rather than for their deal-making and constant games of executive musical chairs.
