Yahoo Life Wants to Bring the Web Together in Your Inbox

Yahoo wants to be your new starting point on the web. The company recently demoed a proof of concept app which shows how Yahoo plans to integrate its services, as well as outside sites, in hopes of become your go-to hub of internet activity. Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang demoed the coming service mashup, dubbed Yahoo […]

yahoo.jpgYahoo wants to be your new starting point on the web. The company recently demoed a proof of concept app which shows how Yahoo plans to integrate its services, as well as outside sites, in hopes of become your go-to hub of internet activity.

Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang demoed the coming service mashup, dubbed Yahoo Life (not to be confused with Microsoft's Live services) at the ongoing CES Trade Show.

As with Google's emphasis on Gmail as a starting point, Yahoo wants to convert Yahoo Mail from a simple e-mail client to a communications hub for all your internet activity — messaging, social networking, e-mail, mapping and more.

For instance, Yang showed off how you might plan a dinner using the service. ZDNet's Dan Farber, who was at the keynote, explains:

Third parties applications can be accessed via the interface as well as recommended services from friends. My Conversations is a way for Yahoo Mail and inbox to digest various threads, Yang said. He gave an example of planning a dinner for CES. You can drag the thread into a map and it will bring up the profiles of those on the mail, note preferences (for food in this case) and suggest restaurants in the area. You can also take an email message, pop up the profiles of those on the message, take an address from email and show it a map.

Yahoo also spent some time touting openness and talked about creating new ways for developers to use various Yahoo services, though so far the details are thin.

Yahoo's only problem is that it isn't the only company that wants to be your starting point on the web — Google, Microsoft and others are also hard at work creating similar functionality.

However, Yahoo's strategy of allowing access to outside services is somewhat different from Google's approach where everything lives under the Google umbrella. In other parts of his demo Yang showed off easy access to services from sites like EBay, LinkedIn and MySpace.

Yahoo seems to recognize that today's web users are more interested in best of breed apps than loyalty to any particular portal, which strikes us as a sound approach. Of course all this is still theoretical. Yang was careful to point out that this isn't even a product announcement, rather it's the direction Yahoo intends to move in the future.

The keynote wasn't all speculation though, there's a new version of Yahoo Go, the company's mobile platform, available for developers to begin using. The Yahoo Go 3.0 beta can be found on Yahoo Mobile.

Assuming Yahoo can pull something useful together in the near future, turning Yahoo Live into an actual service could help Yahoo pull out of the slump it seems to have been in for the past year or so.

Update: Just so there's no confusion let me be clear: there is, at this point no Yahoo product of service named 'Life.' As with terms like 'Google Phone,' 'iTablet' and others, 'Yahoo Life' is a convenience phrase coined by the blogophere to refer to what at this point is a vague, nebulous and only potential Yahoo product.

[via ZDNet which has some screenshots of how the Yahoo Live might look]

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