Yahoo Introduces Apps For its Mail, Homepage

Yahoo is devising new strategies to compensate its lost war over search engine in April results. This time it seems, Yahoo plans to take its competitors, obviously arch rival Google, for a ride. On Friday, Yahoo expanded its Open Strategy by introducing new apps into the homepage, Yahoo Mail, TV widgets, and Zimbra. With this effort Yahoo users will be able to escape site-hopping and help the users to perform multiple tasks at once. The new move follows Yahoo’s announcement in December that it would make the technology all more open to the external developers and integrate social networking features into the site. Let’s take a look at Yahoo’s efforts to enrich users experience.

Yahoo’s new inclusions in homepage

For the recipes, menus, wine reviews, and recommended pairings you have the Food & Wine Pairing app from Snooth. Look for the environment tips from Green Lifestyle app by Mokugift. To manage you finances, set budget and money-saving tips Yahoo will offer Mint.com app.

In case you are blogger there’s an app for WordPress that allows to post and update your blogs without leaving the Yahoo.

How to add the apps to your Yahoo homepage?

Its quite simple, go to yahoo.com, click on the add content and select your app of choice. Currently there are 18 apps in Yahoo for you.

Enhanced Yahoo Mail

For the Yahoo Mail users its a party. Now, you’ll be able to access the following directly from the inbox

• PayPal - request or send money via PayPal
• Picnik photo editing - edit photos and share photo collages
• Zumo Web storage - email heavy files as much as 100MB for free

The features for Mail are in beta and not widely available.

How to get the extra features in your Yahoo Mail?

In order to access the above mentioned features in your Yahoo mail account here is what you gotta do.

You need to sign up with this web site - overview.mail.yahoo.com and enter your yahoo ID. By signing for the website you will be added to Yahoo’s list of interested users and notified when the tools are available.

Widgets for TV

Last year, Intel and Yahoo had joined announce the Yahoo Widget Channel. This technology would allow TVs to connect to the Internet to access widgets. This would add value to the TV software experience.

For those widget enabled TVs, Yahoo is adding widgets for YouTube and cable channel Showtime. Both of these would offer access to videos from the sites. Soon eBay widget will also be joined.

Add contents to Zimbra

Zimbra is Yahoo’s open source e-mail and collaboration software. Yahoo added contents to Zimbra. This will allow the users to automatically save emails as documents, drop sticky notes on messages and manage expense reports easily.