Yahoo is in the midst of retooling its Mail web service to heavily focus on social networking and the integration of third-party apps. At the center of the change is a simplified inbox interface, which looks a bit like a cross between Twitter and a Facebook wall. Those other users whom you're friends with show up as your "connections". Ones with recent activity are displayed with with their profile photo and a list of recent email subjects they've sent you. Clicking on one of those links opens the mail just like the traditional inbox would. The benefit here is that you're only seeing people you know, and you get a cute little photo by their names rather than a text-only inbox listing. For those of you who'd prefer the professional look of a standard inbox, that option's still available, and includes a new selection to display messages from your connections only.

The system attempts to grow your connections list by auto-suggesting users its algorithms detect you have some sort of existing relationship with. Another segment of the main Mail page displays non-mail updates from your connections, again replicating the experience of Twitter or Facebook's status updates. Here you can see comments left by your connections on news sites, information on new people they've added as connections, and information pulled from other company's servers, like the direct integration of Twitter messages.

Besides connections, the other big change to Yahoo Mail is its apps support. Companies are invited to create in-browser applications to add functionality to the Mail experience, able to crawl the data provided by your profile, connections list, and inbox. Right now the system is available to beta testers, with a full roll-out in the works. One of the apps so far created is by Yahoo-owned Flickr, letting you pull up your Flickr gallery and easily embed photos in your emails. Wordpress has an app that lets you take emails and convert them into posts for display with the blogging software. Relative newcomer Xoopit lets you keep track of every single photo that you email out or gets emailed to you; rather than for you to have to to archive and sort photo attachments manually, Xoopit is supposed to find them all and display a thumbnail gallery to help you quickly find what you're looking for.

While the mini-apps are intriguing, a lot of the new Yahoo Mail platform seems ho-hum. Integrating information from other social networks into one screen is a valiant idea, but it just seems like the company is playing catch-up with the established networking sites; if you can't innovate, amalgamate. Some of the other improvements just don't seem "feature worthy", like the show-only-mail-from-contacts option, which should have been an obvious option from the get-go. Where this could succeed, though, is if the apps provide enough useful functionality to draw users away from other social sites long enough to sell them on Yahoo's grand integrated platform, and that's going to depend largely on what third-party innovators get on board with the system. If you've been beta testing the new system, what are your thoughts? Are the example apps so far winning you over?

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