A day after requesting to have the beta access to Yahoo Mail’s open application, my wish was granted today. These application are only accessible via beta URL, but you won’t be able to see it unless you have been granted access prior that.
The first app that I open definitely WordPress. As my early guess, it wasn’t something that new. It allow you to post a new article to wordpress.com or your own hosted wordpress blog(require XMLRPC setup) as well as reading WordPress.com blogs.
Next to it is Flickr. It offer option whether you want Yahoo Mail accessing your Flickr account or not. By allowing Yahoo Mail talking to Flickr (yeah they share the same Yahoo ID), you’ll be able to open and share your photostream, your friends photos or favourite photos to others via email. Not to worry, if you don’t have Flickr account, since you can still viewing and sharing public photos.
I did open other applications but not go through it very much, as I’m not really into is as often as WordPress & Flickr.
Third party applications
Will Yahoo bring Facebook, Myspace or even Twitter in? Probably..
My cent is, fully functional application is not required here. Personally ,if I want to browse Facebook, I prefer to open it on new browser.
But just like Flickr & WordPress, put the most frequently used functions such as ‘tweeting’ for Twitter or posting status update to Facebook is sufficient. Others have done it (even WordPress has such plugins), so to company like this size shouldn’t have no problem implement it if they wish (particularly twitter).
Yahoo own services
Beside these third party applications, Yahoo should consider bring in its own application such as Yahoo Buzz, Yahoo Answer inside. Flickr is a good starter though.
Don’t forget the root..
But the ultimate goal of Yahoo Mail is to provide excellent experience when doing email related task, which I feel not really up to the level compared to previous Yahoo Mail. In my observation, the emails are taking longer time to load (although sometime it is erroring) with and without any applications opened.
This is quite irritating, when thinking of all these hypes about the new features, but the ‘foundation’ of Yahoo Email itself has started to shows its weeknesses.
Nevertheless, this is still in beta, and we’ll see how it perfoms once its open to every Yahoo users.
