Categories: Social Media

Yahoo! Mail gets a social upgrade & becomes a strong competitor to Facebook Messages

Yahoo! is rolling out a major a social media upgrade to its Yahoo! Mail web app today, and this spells greater competition for Facebook Messages.

The new look Yahoo! Mail will not only manage emails but will also provide access to SMS, social media updates and instant messaging chats.  These additions to the popular email platform brings Yahoo! Mail into direct competition with Facebook Messages, which was redesigned to mange similar services last year.

According to the Yahoo! Mail blog these updates allow users to, “Instantly respond to messages from Facebook, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Mail and other webmail providers with a new easy reply bar… [and] view and share notifications and updates from Twitter, Facebook and Zynga.”

Last year Facebook redesigned its Messaging system to become a singular source for users conversations, regardless of the medium. Blake Irving, Yahoo! Mail’s Chief Product Officer pointed to similar thinking from Yahoo! when he described the company’s vision for its email client, “Yahoo’s vision for online communications brings together all the tools that people use to connect–e-mail, chat, SMS, and social updates–and makes it easier for them to share content and engage in conversations with the people that matter most to them.”

Although Yahoo! is playing catch up with Google and Facebook it still has a large userbase of 248 million people who will likely appreciate these improvement.

Also as part of this upgrade Yahoo! has improved the site’s speed and search functionality.  The site has also been optimised for mobile use and comes with better spam filtering.

Ajit Jain

Ajit Jain is marketing and sales head at Octal Info Solution, a leading iPhone app development company and offering platform to hire Android app developers for your own app development project. He is available to connect on Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

View Comments

Recent Posts

DARPA ‘Generative Optogenetics (GO)’ seeks to program biology using light, could aid in ‘extended human spaceflight’

Apart from 'extended human spaceflight' for what other purposes could DARPA GO serve? perspective DARPA…

6 hours ago

Competing in the post-gatekeeper era: How the DMA is rewiring platforms, security, and market access

The Digital Markets Act (DMA) has joined the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) as one…

3 days ago

Horasis India Meeting to Spotlight India’s Global Ascent At Singapore Summit This Month

Amid several years of shifting global dynamics, it’s become increasingly clear that we are entering…

4 days ago

AI scams targeting businesses are surging: Here are the top 3 threats your team is likely to face in 2026 (Brains Byte Back Podcast)

Imagine a company interviewing a candidate for a senior IT role. The résumé checks out,…

5 days ago

AI Won’t Scale in Advertising Until Trust Does: How to Identify AI Tools That Deliver Quality Security and Expertise

At the start of the year, data suggested that only about a third of agencies,…

5 days ago

What It Means When Algorithms Say “I”: Toward a Theory of Digital Subjectivity

Picture an AI assistant you have worked with for the past five years. It knows…

5 days ago