Yahoo Mail Out of Beta; New Features

The new Yahoo Mail interface went into public beta in September 2006, although Yahoo was testing it long before that. Tonight Yahoo takes the “beta” label off of the product and makes it the default interface for all new Yahoo mail accounts.

Yahoo mail already has an integrated RSS reader and instant messaging. They also recently announced unlimited storage for all mail users.

They are also releasing a few new features.

Shortcuts: Mail now has a number of intelligent shortcuts. Things like addresses, places, dates, contact information, etc. are underlined with blue dots. Click on the link and see a mashup with maps (for addresses), travel guides (for places), calendar (for dates), etc. New services are being added regularly.

SMS/Text Messaging: Yahoo wants you to use their mail application whenever you contact your friends, however you contact them. In addition to emailing or instant messaging clients, you can now send them a text message from the mail interface. Their responses also come in directly to Yahoo Mail. It currently works for U.S., India, Philippines and Canadian mobile numbers.

Is Yahoo Mail a better webmail application than GMail? In our comparisons GMail always comes out on top, although the main reason is tagging of messages and the fact that GMail gives free forwarding and POP access to the account. Yahoo still charges $20/year for forwarding or POP access. For users who still like their desktop mail clients, POP access is an important feature. Yahoo says they are considering making it a free option, but they have a lot of paying mail customers. If they make too many features free, they jeopardize that revenue stream. Offering unlimited free storage really pushed the limits, so I don’t expect them to move more features from paid to free any time soon.

The new interface is the final realization of Yahoo’s 2004 acquisition of Ajax pioneer Oddpost. The new mail product is based largely on ideas first launched by Oddpost in 2002.

Startups aren’t just sitting around as the big guys upgrade their webmail apps, though. Our favorite product in this space is Orgoo, which launches this fall and lets users pull in mail and IM accounts from any number of providers. Foldera is another promising product in this space (I was previously on their board of directors, but I do not own any stock in the company).

All New Bloglines Launches in Beta

Bloglines, the grandfather of web based RSS readers, launched a new beta site this evening at beta.bloglines.com. Like everyone else these days, the most notable new feature is an Ajax customizable home page where users can drag and reorder feeds for a quick view.

Bloglines now has three viewing options - quick view (the new Ajax drag and drop view in the image to the left), three pane “Outlook-like” view and the classic full view with two panes. The site is also trying to manage unread feeds more intelligently, a common user complaint in the past.

The company says more changes are coming. Options for saving, sending and sharing stories, tools for building link blogs, managing blog rolls, etc. are all on the way. In the meantime, the classic bloglines site will remain available at bloglines.com. Feeds remain synced between the two sites.

Product iterations come very slowly at Bloglines, which was acquired by Ask.com in early 2005. The last major news from them was the integration of blog search over a year ago. Meanwhile, Google Reader has quickly grabbed the attention of the early adopter crowd, and is by far the most popular feed reader used by our readers according to Feedburner stats.

Richard MacManus has a much longer review of the product at Read/Write Web.

Strayform Tries New Indie Music Model

Strayform is a Texas startup that, like SellaBand and the recently funded Amie Street, is giving unsigned artists a way to promote and sell their music.

Like SellaBand, artists sign up, upload some of their music and then create proposals for new music they want to create. Fans can listen to and download the music (DRM free), and donate directly to proposals they like. The proposals are all different. One artist, for example, says he will mention the name of person who pledges the most in the song itself.

The service is more like SellaBand than Amie Street. SellaBand also lets artists upload music and takes donations. If donations get to $50k, as they have for several artists already, The artist gets a contract with a label. Amie Street, by contrast, simply lets artists sell their music on the site. Downloads starts at free and the price increases steadily as more downloads occur.

Strayform has had little press, but, inexplicably were covered by Fox News in a 3 minute segment. The video is available on their home page. I like the service, but the site sure could use a redesign.

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Posted in Company & Product Profiles |

Alexa Says YouTube Is Now Bigger Than Goog

New Generation Adult Sites Roundup

Online porn is usually a cutting edge industry and it is always all about the money. The industry is often first to the Internet with new features that eventually trickle down to mainstream consumer sites.

The latest wave of web innovation, though, was centered squarely on consumer sites. And the porn guys have adapted many of those features to create massively successful second generation adult content sites. PornoTube was the first we came across, in mid 2006. Others, like EroShare, have followed. We also mentioned Red Light District, a virtual world, in a recent roundup post.

Go2Web2 has just posted a roundup of some additional ones. Some of these have fantastic names - MegaRotic, Fantasti.cc, NippleByte, and StumblePorn, for example.

Many of these sites are little more than lead generation tools for more traditional porn sites (and if you are going to visit them, put on some protection first). But it is fascinating to see the industry try anything new to get new money in. Lots of competition and lots of money drive all of this.