Yahoo! has added new open, social features to Yahoo! Mail, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Toolbar and Yahoo! Updates. Yahoo! Mail comes with a new Welcome Page which surfaces email messages, information and activity from users' friends, as well as third-party applications integrated in the inbox. The new version of Yahoo! Mail will be available for users on a limited basis over the coming months. My Yahoo! users can now add applications created by third-party developers to their personal start pages. Built using the Yahoo! Application Platform, the interactive applications will range from productivity tools to games. Also being launched is My Yahoo! Theme API which lets third-party designers create and share their templates for My Yahoo! pages, offering users a wider range of backgrounds and styles. Yahoo also announces new features for the Yahoo! Toolbar which will be available next year. These features include: applications for checking new emails from Yahoo! and other web-based email providers, monitoring or searching for items on eBay, and finding local movie showtimes; alerts that notify a user about updates from their personal connections, including their friends' recent activity across the Yahoo! network and on the web; and personal search suggestions that surface the websites a user has visited and provide search results directly from the toolbar. On top of unveiling friend updates in the new Yahoo! Toolbar and Mail, Yahoo! will begin sharing relevant updates within Yahoo! Music and Yahoo! TV. Yahoo! Updates enable Yahoo! users to see online activities of their connections across the Yahoo! network, such as a recently Buzzed articled, a hotel review in Yahoo! Travel, adding a new application to My Yahoo!, or a rating on Yahoo! TV. Yahoo! recently started displaying activity updates in Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Buzz, and will include activity updates from other social websites across the web in the coming months. The Yahoo! Updates platform is also available as an open API, allowing any site on the web to submit activities into it.
