The New Yahoo Mail
I logged into Yahoo Mail this morning to find they made some updates. From an aesthetic standpoint I was less than enthused but when I started poking around I thought they really added some useful features.
One Gripe
My quick gripe is with the new controls. Nothing marries up to one another the way it should. It may be that they didn’t test on Safari but that’s really an unacceptable excuse to me anymore.
Useful Features
A really useful feature is the integration of apps that you would find useful, especially when thinking about email. They are located in the lower-left corner and when you click one of the apps, it opens the app in a new tab or window depending on the app. I am very happy to see that Yahoo finally figure out a way to integrate Flickr. It’s about time that acquisition made some sense.
Now you can click Flickr, a new tab opens, and you can select as many images you like and click Share. This creates a new email with links to the images on Flickr with small thumbnail previews for the recipient.
None of these changes are game-changing. But the application as a whole just became a lot more useful. I use Flickr all the time. And there’s no integration between Flickr and Gmail, my webmail interface of choice. By continuing to think of new ways to better serve the user, Yahoo gets to keep its name in the webmail-provider conversation. I could see how an avid user of Flickr might be swayed to use Yahoo Mail over Gmail with the new updates.
