Similar to the opportunity we described in our previous coverage, Yahoo explains why this might be a big deal: “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.”
Beyond Mail, Yahoo also made several developer-related announcements for other products, including My Yahoo, which now also enables users to add applications to their start pages. Despite competition from iGoogle, Netvibes, and others, My Yahoo remains the leading start page in terms of traffic, making it an equally big opportunity.
Yahoo’s platform play certainly works to the company’s strength, which is its hundreds of millions of eyeballs around the world. With only a handful of sample applications, it’s a bit too early to speculate how it will fair against the likes of Google with its gadgets for iGoogle and Gmail, but it will certainly be one of the major stories to watch in 2009 as Yahoo attempts to re-invent itself.
Below, a screenshot of Xoopit's application, which organizes photos from your inbox so you can quickly access and email them to friends:
