Yahoo's free email gets more social

By Glenn Chapman Agence France-Presse SAN FRANCISCO -- Yahoo on Monday began weaving trendy social-networking feature s into its popular free email service as it vies to be the preferred launching point for Internet surfers. Yahoo says it is providing tools that lets people use its email service to buil d interactive communities based on friends and interests. "Mail is the largest dormant social graph," Yahoo Mail vice president John Krem er said while outlining enhancements to the service used by 275 million people worldwide every month. "This is the first time we are exposing that in a significant way." A "smarter inbox" puts messages from friends or family in a separate, tabbed fi le so they don't get buried under mountains of spam or work email. The inbox for the the first time lets people install third-party app lications such as movie-recommendation service Flixster and blogging tools from WordPress. Technology from startup Xoopit (pronounced swoop-it) will fetch all pictures bu ried in stored emails, even retrieving images from website links found in messa ges. "Email is a place where a lot of people live," said Xoopit co-founder Bijan Mar ashi. "Yahoo users have years of gems in old emails. There are hundreds of millions o f people not on social networks, but with years of data in their email." Marashi pulled up his three-year-old email account as an example, revealing it held 7,745 pictures. Yahoo Mail is being infused with a "social dimension" that builds on similar fe atures being added to the California firm's other Internet properties, accordin g to Open Strategy director of product development Cody Simms. Mirroring a winning move by social-networking star Facebook, Yahoo opened up it s platform this year to let third-party developers create fun, hip, or function al applications adapted to its online offerings. Yahoo wants to enhance the social aspects of its website in order to attract ne w people to its online services and get existing users to spend more time on it s advertising-supported pages. Yahoo claims more than 500 million users worldwide but has been struggling to c ash-in on its popularity. Yahoo isn't trying to be a MySpace or Facebook, but wants to add "the right bit s of social that make sense to our audience," said Yahoo Audience Product Divis ion vice president Ash Patel. "There are maybe 150 to 250 million users on those networks," Patel said of the top two social-networking services. "With the billion people on the web, that means some 800 million don't use those services." Yahoo is aiming to give its half a billion users tools that let them better con nect as a community while using its Web pages, according to Patel. "To be a starting point in this day and age you have to add the best of the web -- social elements," Patel said, referring to Yahoo's stated goal of being the preferred launch point for web surfers. "Yahoo started off linking people to the rest of the Web. It is part of our cul ture. It is part of our heritage." Yahoo's move is the latest salvo in an escalating war to become the preferred b ase of operations for people's increasingly immersive and diverse online activi ties, according to Flixster co-founder Joe Greenstein. Facebook Connect lets people link profiles to outside websites so they can flit about the Internet without straying from the social networking website. Internet search firms treasure their slots as "default" pages set to automatica lly open in Web browsers. "It is going to be a really interesting war to see where the user bases end up, " Greenstein said. "My guess is we will see multiple winners by demographics. Y ahoo has one of the clearest visions as a starting point."