December 15, 2008

Yahoo! Mail rolls out a smarter inbox

You may have seen today’s news announcing the next generation of Yahoo! Mail — rolling out a “smarter inbox”experience to users. One way to make an inbox smarter: make applications that can work within it, opening up Yahoo! Mail to content and services built outside the Yahoo! network.

We’ve talked here before about the Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS), and in October we released the Yahoo! Application Platform (YAP), Yahoo! Social Platform (YSP), and Yahoo! Query Language (YQL), giving developers access to Yahoo!’s tools and data to start building applications for Yahoo!’s vast audience and the Web beyond.

Today, we’re extending these technologies to Mail, providing developers with access to our documentation and guidelines for building apps that run on this new canvas. With a highly engaged and active audience of hundreds of millions of users around the world, the opportunity to create innovative applications that drive traffic back to your site and increase user engagement with your services is huge. Because of the sensitivity of the information in people’s inboxes, we’re adding developers gradually while we refine the application security and privacy protections our Yahoo! Mail users demand.

To create applications for Yahoo! Mail, developers will be using the Yahoo! Application Platform to build, test, and submit their apps. Developers will be able to embed a JavaScript application inside an iframe running in the all-new Yahoo! Mail. These apps can then interact with the Mail container—and do things like register a callback when a message is dragged-and-dropped onto your app, pop open a new Compose tab with app-generated content, or fetch social data from around the Yahoo! network through YQL—using the JS APIs we provide. They can also call out to your own or a third party’s web services, optionally using OAuth or a Flickr-style signed-call-home for authentication.

Our users are looking for applications that help them communicate better and be more productive. The apps in this first release - including Flixster, Wordpress, and Xoopit- allow them to share media with their friends and families, enhance their email experience, and to generally “get things done.” Mail is an essential part of people’s daily lives, and our 275 million users’ inboxes are already full of contextual information with tons of opportunity to build upon. It’s also universally sensitive data. We’re taking an incremental approach so we can learn what our users want and what developers need to be successful. Today we've begun by beta-testing select applications in Yahoo! Mail with a limited group of Yahoo! Mail power users in the U.S. In 2009, we plan to extend this functionality more broadly to mail users worldwide.

There’s a long list of areas we’d like to open up while we’re “rewiring Yahoo!.” As we expand the API list, we will also invite developers to build applications on the all-new Yahoo! Mail gradually and deliberately over 2009. We don’t have a wait list in place yet, but stay tuned to this blog for more detailed information in the coming months.

To find out more about application development in Yahoo! Mail, visit the Yahoo! Mail developer pages within YDN . Explore the docs and best practices for developing apps on the all-new Yahoo! Mail. It’s never too soon to start coding.

Mark Risher
Director, Product Management
Yahoo! Mail

Posted at December 15, 2008 1:05 PM | Permalink

Bookmark this on Delicious

Comments

Posted by: Vasudev Ram at December 20, 2008 1:52 PM

Posted by: John Cox at May 16, 2009 12:06 PM