Today, some new information has emerged from Om Malik, who suggests that the company is soon to launch an application platform for Yahoo Mail. According to Malik, “the program is expected to launch in beta relatively soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the Yahoo mail client … Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.”
And that’s quite a possibility to consider. Take for example evite, one of the applications rumored to be a part of the beta launch. Instead of needing to go to evite.com to create an event, import your address book, and send invites, everything could (in theory, not many details are known about how Y! Mail’s platform will work) be done from within the Yahoo Mail inbox. And that’s a big deal – while average users spend a couple hours per month on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, web-based mail programs are typically kept open constantly when users go online.
Further, when you think about how applications have grown in the social networking space over the past few years, the primary method has been word-of-mouth – more specifically, virtual word-of-mouth in the form of email invites, app invites on social networks, or just an IM to a friend saying “hey, check this out.” By putting the applications themselves within the inbox, the viralness and utility could be amplified by several orders of magnitude.
While evite is perhaps the easiest example with which to imagine the potential of such a platform, other apps that immediately come to mind include PayPal, Scribd and Docstoc, and photo sharing apps like Yahoo-owned Flickr; essentially, any app that requires or makes heavy use of email, but integrated into the inbox instead of a website.