Yahoo Mail Beta offers Social Media Integration

Amelia and I made a trip down to the Yahoo! office yesterday to check out Yahoo! Mail (Beta) and the new Messenger.

Let me first establish that I started a Yahoo! account back when I was like, nine. That was when Yahoo! games were still in vogue, auctions were still up, before Hotmail came into my life, and before I abandoned everything and migrated to Gmail.

So it was great seeing how Yahoo! was reinventing itself to stay relevant with today’s technology. I would liken it to meeting an old friend that now looks very attractive. You feel compelled to get back in touch. Here’s a teaser video.

What’s new?

• Communicate faster and do more – Designed from the ground up to provide blazing fast performance, this new version will be at least twice as fast for most people around the world. Yahoo! Mail Beta also speeds up tools that allow people to be more productive with the time they have, by more easily finding messages from contacts or using third-party applications directly within the inbox.
• Stay connected to social networks – As a central destination for social experiences from across the Web, Yahoo! Mail Beta lets people view and share updates from Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo!, and beyond. Additional features include enhanced IM and SMS capabilities for seamless chatting and texting within Yahoo! Mail Beta.
• View photos and videos right from your inbox – Automatic slideshow features mean people can easily see photos and videos from sites like Flickr, Picasa, and YouTube from right within their email messages.
• Search through mail with ease – A new mail search tool leverages Yahoo!’s wealth of search science and technology to help people quickly find the right emails. New search refinement features allow users to easily navigate, sort, and narrow search results by sender, attachment file, date, or folder location.
• Stay protected from spam – Independently verified as the world’s #1 email provider in protecting users from spam, Yahoo! Mail Beta uses Yahoo!’s global cloud computing infrastructure to further Yahoo!’s anti-spam efforts and provide an even safer mail experience. According to Yahoo!, studies have shown that their spam protection is 55% better that that offered by Gmail / Hotmail.
  
• Another useful point to note that isn’t new is that Yahoo! offers users unlimited storage.

It’s great to see that Yahoo! is engaging in a much needed facelift, and staying relevant by recognizing that social media has become an integral part of our lives.

While trying it, we found that it provided seamless integration and an intuitive user interface. Note that it’s still in it’s Beta version, so there are still kinks to be ironed out. If you find any, feel free to send some feedback over.

To get the new version, search on Yahoo.com for “Yahoo! Mail Beta” or visit http://features.mail.yahoo.com and click “Try It Now”.

Find out more at the Yahoo! Mail Blog.