Yahoo to Add Social Networking to E-Mail

Yahoo says that it plans to add aspects of social networking to its e-mail and portal in the future, according to an interview in the New York Times. Yahoo's community and communication chief Brad Garlinghouse called the new effort "Inbox 2.0." For example, instead of the typical way of displaying messages, the company is now looking into ways to decipher which messages are from people that you would most want to read.

From here, a user could find out more about the sender through a profile, and a news feed of what is happening with users, such as what they may be doing at current, when their birthdays may be and the like. Heavy users of Yahoo services would have a more extensive profile, as the feature would pull in information from around the Yahoo network "The inbox you have today is based on what people send you, not what you want to see," Mr. Garlinghouse told the NYT. "We can say, here are the messages from the people you care about most."