A day after announcing the upgrade of Yahoo! Mail into unlimited storage capacity for registered users beginning in May, Yahoo! unveils the Yahoo! Mail Web Services. With the Yahoo! Mail Web Services, Yahoo! Mail APIs are now available to third party applications developer through SOAP or JSON. Yahoo is hoping to increase its current user base of around 250 million with this new development. With the Yahoo! Mail Web Service:
you can connect to the core mail platform to perform typical mailbox tasks for premium users such as list messages and folders, and compose and send messages (you can also build mail preview tools for free users with limited Web Service functionality)
And to entice third party developers further, Yahoo is giving them commissions if they are able to develop high end applications that is used by Yahoo premium members (read: paid members).
So, what’s in it for us, simple netizens of the websphere? For Yahoo mail users, this would mean better functionality of course, especially if third party developers continuously come up with brilliant ideas and applications for Yahoo mail. Honestly, I’m not a big fan of Yahoo mail since I used Gmail simply because of Gmail’s simplicity and ease of use. I get turned off by too much eye candy when reading my emails. But who knows, with this development in Yahoo! Mail, third party developers might come up with a way to clone Google’s interface and use in Yahoo’s Mail platform. Now, that would be a great email application coupled with unlimited storage capacity.
