We missed commenting on this earlier in the week when it came out, but Yahoo! made an announcement regarding its newly revamped set of services, including Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, and search. Featured among the changes are:
- a new streamlined design (yup, Windows Live has that)
- 3rd party apps (WL: well not really, unless you count in-house services like SkyDrive and Calendar, or additions to the profile page)
- enhanced photo sharing (yup,
Windows Live has that – oops, it’s turned off at the moment) - increased attachment limits (umm, WL Hotmail trails all mail services listed in this Wikipedia comparison at 10mb – the new Yahoo! will have 25)
- more social features (yup, Windows Live has that)
- mobile email features (Windows Live has that, but Yahoo! has announced support for downloading pdf and Office attachments and access to personal folders)
- video calls (yup, but Yahoo! is featuring full screen calls. Is that coming for WLMessenger?)
- Yahoo! Insider (this sounds like the Today page. Doesn’t everyone just turn that off?)
- language selector (does the Bing Translator bot count?)
- improved iPhone app (ummm, no – just POP for Mail or 3rd party apps)
In addition, Yahoo! is testing a new search results page (??), which sounds a lot like Bing Jr. The Bing-Yahoo! partnership is a year away at least, even if it does clear regulatory hurdles, and these new changes are the result of engineering that happened before the partnership was announced, so not too surprising to see continued innovation for Yahoo! search, now and moving forward.
This will be interesting to watch moving forward, as Windows Live is in direct competition with Yahoo! services, but at the same time Microsoft needs Yahoo! to succeed in order to drive Bing traffic. Will Wave 4 return serve? We should find out soon.