Yahoo Mail earlier this morning emerged from a year-long public beta period with two significant new features as well as other refinements.
Yahoo Mail now includes the ability to send text messages to mobile phones. It also now allows users to send instant messages to both Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger users.
John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail said in a blog post:
Not only are we launching a brand new version of one of the most popular Web mail services in the world, but we’re unveiling a solution to my texting woes, and giving people around the world more ways to connect.
With the new Yahoo Mail, people can send and receive free text messages in their e-mail to and from any mobile phone number in participating markets including the US, Canada, India and the Philippines.
Yahoo claims that the new Yahoo Mail is more responsive than it was during beta testing, that it includes advanced search options for sifting through e-mail messages and that users now have six new color themes to choose from.
U.S.-based users of Yahoo Mail can take advantage of new shortcuts to underline words in messages, to add events directly to their Yahoo Calendars, to add friends to their contacts, to view a Yahoo Map of a selected address, or to perform a Web search on a selected word.
To establish the potential impact of text messaging capabilities on Yahoo Mail, Kremer cites statistics showing that 69% of US mobile phone users between the ages of 18-39 use text messaging (Harris Interactive, June 2006) and that half of Americans age 18-25 say they sent or received a text message over the phone every day (Pew Research Center, January 2007).
Whether text messaging will lift Yahoo Mail’s flat growth rate remains to be seen.
Yahoo is planning to roll out co-branded versions of the new Yahoo Mail to partners like AT&T, Verizon, and Rodgers, as well as to users of its Yahoo Small Business users in the fall.
