At an event today, Yahoo gave us a preview of what the future holds for their products. They plan to make major enhancements to both their mail and search products as well as to the overall Yahoo! experience. In a post on their blog, they gave some detail as to what we should expect:
Some of the updates you can expect to see this fall include:
- A new Yahoo! Mail experience with even more focus on performance and speed
- New Yahoo! Search experiences with rich, immersive results that keep you in the loop on the news and entertainment topics that matter to you the most
- Twitter integration on Yahoo! that will allow you to link your accounts so you can view and share updates with friends across both networks
- A new Yahoo! app for iPad and other tablets that’s designed to deliver personally relevant news, information, and essentials like weather, commute updates, and more
- Customized Content Ads with creative formats that leverage an advertiser’s robust content and enable social sharing
- New Connected TV partnerships that provide consumers with thousands of video-on-demand content sources, social networks, games, music, shopping, and more — all while watching TV
The new Yahoo mail is up to 2x faster, easier to use, and provides better protection for your data. It features inline IM, inline SMS, folders, and unlimited storage. A “What’s New” page shows you the latest emails, IMs, and tweets. Just as Hotmail did just recently, Yahoo is stepping their webmail game way up. These updates should put them on par with both Gmail and Hotmail.
Yahoo is paying a lot of attention to the social web. They say social is “just getting started” and want to help you own “real social relationships on the web.” They are looking to “build an ecosystem” by pulling together various pieces of the social web, using your own personal data to enhance your Yahoo experience. Another piece of the puzzle is in reaching 100% user authentication. This means you will be able to login to Yahoo using your ID from just about any other service: Twitter, Facebook, and more.
On the social networking side, Yahoo recognizes that it’s sometimes hard to be yourself on most social networking sites. We usually act different depending on who we’re around. Yahoo wants to help you organize your friends into groups, a problem that Orkut tackled with their recent launch of Personas.
On the search side, we will see a “more visually compelling” experience that will “let you discover information and be entertained all on one search result page.” Search will also include trending topics and a slideshow of stories related to what’s going on.
While many have written Yahoo off, it looks like they are trying their best to keep up. With the speed that the web is moving at, it remains to be seen if they will succeed.
via Yahoo!, Business Insider