The Next Battle Field between Yahoo & Google & Microsoft: Email 2.0

Yahoo has already been working on Yahoo Mail Platform to allow 3rd-party developers to write applications enhance Yahoo Mail experience.

Xobni has been enhancing the Outlook experience. I don't know what's the reason of MS not buying Xobni. But Xobni has everything that Outlook and email services ought to have.

Today, Google rolled out new Gmail Lab features to allow preview of youtube, flickr, picasa, Yelp contents whenever they detect relevant links in your emails.

This is another step forward in the next big battle field between Yahoo and Google(and maybe hotmail/live email, but they don't have anything similar yet). Just think about how much time we spend on email every day. For people that are not heavy Facebook or Twitter users, email is likely the app that consumes majority of our attention.

People have been trying to build a social network around emails. I don't think it's the killer app(yet) because the current email experience just sucks for any socializing.

Just think about the amount of data stored in emails(especially when email providers give out gigs of free spaces) and the intelligence we can have gathered from it if we had different email applications that can deal with this data. We cannot simply deal with the influx of info in our email boxes with folder structure/tagging.

I am sure Google is working on GMail as a platform project. It just makes so much sense for them as it makes GMail more sticky, and it's a great weapon for beating out popular Yahoo Mail.

Let's hope more and more email platforms come out to enable 3rd-party developers to develop interesting, innovating, helpful applications. We are in great needs of some real email applications to make better sense, organization, and collaboration from our emails first.

Tags: application api platform email gmail yahoo_mail xobni