With Yahoo’s announcement that they will open up their popular email service, this presents a new oppourtunity for web developers to stretch the boundaries of what was once an exclusive application– the web email.
One possible scenario is the emergence of a mashup email service that could include Yahoo’s mail service and other web mail providers, such as Google Mail and Microsoft’s Hotmail, provided that they too will provide API’s or access to their email service.
Mashups, or customized websites that aggregate components from various web services, have become popular in light of the Web 2.0 wave of applications. Popurls, Ning and Zohocreator are some of the sites that follow this model.
Here are some of the Web 2.0 applications we might see in the next year or so:
- A site that extends Yahoo! Mail where emails can become blog posts or blog comments.
- Yahoo! Mail acts as a submitter application to Digg, Del.icio.us and Reddit, to mention a few.
- Tag clouds in email!
- Emails will display the sender’s location, via Google Maps
- Related RSS feeds will be displayed based on the contents of the inbox
- Automatic storage of image attachments to Flickr
- Integration of Yahoo! Mail to online collaboration tools where emails can be sent to set-up milestones and tasks
The list can be longer, and according to Jason Rupp, Yahoo! Mail’s product manager, “There is just all kinds of things people could do.”
