Last August 24, in an event in their Sunnyvale (California) headquarters, Yahoo unveiled a new design for its email service with with updates that will let its users merge their inboxes with other internet services like sending out invitations thru Evite or organize photos with Xoopit (Yahoo acquired this already) without leaving the Yahoo mail interface.
A social networking feature ala Twitter micro-blogging service was also rolled out and is now available to US users and soon to the whole world.
This developments are signs of Yahoo working to defend their position as the top email service provider but the questions are, will it work? Twitter is an established micro-blogging network already and there have been many copycats that tried to take them out but wasn’t successful. For organizing photos, there is Google’s Picasa which is truly wonderful (that’s my opinion) and a lot more popular photo organizing sites such as Photobucket.
I will wait til the service comes to the Philippines and let’s see how those features will work inside a web mail interface.
One more thing why a lot of people like Gmail is because of its free email filtering/forwarding service which is very useful on most occasions.