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Social-storage service Dropio on Thursday announced a partnership with Yahoo Mail to deliver a default application for the e-mail program's users. Dubbed Attach Large Files, Dropio's application will allow Yahoo Mail users to send attachments up to 100 MB in size.

When Yahoo Mail users log on to their accounts, they will now see Dropio's Attach Large Files listing included in the Applications drop-down box, which also features apps from Evite, Flickr, and PayPal, among others. When they click on Dropio's application, they can immediately start sending large files through their e-mail accounts.

The Dropio application isn't available through Yahoo Mail's e-mail composition form. Only when the user clicks on the "Attach Large Files" option will they be brought to a page allowing them to select files from their computer. Once they choose all those files, they can then upload them and compose an e-mail message. The message contains a note at the bottom saying the attachment technology is "powered by Dropio."

Dropio has made its way to Yahoo Mail.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

The recipients will then view the e-mail's contents on a unique Dropio page. There, they can leave a comment or download the files to their computer.

Incorporating the Dropio technology marks an improvement for Yahoo. Currently, users of Google's Yahoo Mail rival, Gmail, can attach up to 25MB to their messages. By effectively quadrupling that figure through Dropio's app, Yahoo Mail has another compelling feature to communicate to users.

Dropio was quick to point out that the app it created for Yahoo was based on its open application-programming interface. It hopes that the Yahoo Mail feature will be used as a proof of concept for other developers to find unique ways to use its API.

Dropio's Attach Large Files application is available now for free in the Yahoo Mail Applications listing.

Has Yahoo finally gotten to the point where it's exchanging peanut butter for WD-40?

Yahoo chief marketing officer Elisa Steele can focus the company on the future now that long-awaited updates to core products are finally ready.

(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET)

Three years ago, Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse wrote the famous "Peanut Butter Manifesto," designed as a wake-up call to a sluggish Yahoo that didn't really seem to know what to do with itself. With the peanut butter analogy, Garlinghouse was referring Yahoo's tendency to spread itself thin across too many projects, but he may as well also have been referring to how projects could be become mired in Yahoo's famous bureaucracy.

Fast forward to 2009, with Yahoo finally having chosen a course for its search business and turning its attention to its core properties, and all of the sudden Yahoo is making the ideas and concepts it has discussed for years come to life. It has taken quite some time but it's becoming clear that Yahoo is putting a higher priority on getting things done.

The MBAs call it "execution," a term trotted out by Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele during Monday's event to describe the launch of Yahoo's new home page last month. Some might snicker at the notion that Yahoo is now an execution company: Yahoo first unveiled an "open" plan to redesign the page in October 2007. And the enhancements described Monday were the central part of former CEO Jerry Yang's January 2008 speech at CES.

And indeed, several of the features demonstrated Monday are either in beta or in bucket testing. In the consumer electronics world, that's called a "paper launch," although standards are different on the Web.

But now that Yahoo is placing a long-term bet on the attractiveness of its services and content, making sure the basics are new enough to attract the digerati but simple enough for the masses is no small undertaking. Delivering on what has long been promised is the first step.

New leadership seems to have helped. The half-dozen vice presidents in attendance at Monday's meeting kept joking about how new some of them were to the company, and the overall impact was not lost that Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has really shaken up the ranks of Yahoo's engineering and marketing culture.

Now the question for Yahoo is whether the changes it is making to the core properties that drive a huge proportion of its traffic are enough to get the ship moving in the right direction. There's a fine line that Yahoo has to walk between keeping up with advances in communication, social networking, and Web technology and the risk of alienating the millions of users who like things just the way they are, people who Yahoo is increasingly reliant upon for advertising revenue.

Either way, Yahoo has to make sure those people stay within its network, the catalyst for several of the features showcased Monday. Those searching for YouTube videos can watch them right in the search results page. Social butterflies can deliver the latest breathless update to their friends right from their inboxes or IM windows, perhaps one day posting directly to networks like Facebook and Twitter without going through a Web application.

The slick redesigns that Yahoo trotted out Monday are long overdue. While the delay may prompt some to wonder exactly what has been going on in Sunnyvale over the past two years, the fire that Bartz lit under Yahoo earlier this year is starting to produce results.

If the next revision to Yahoo's home page or Mail client arrives in 2011, however, all the changes this year will have been for naught.

Yahoo Messenger, along with several other core products, are looking more and more social every day.

(Credit: Yahoo)

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--Yahoo increased the social graces of its core products Monday, with a nod to its new home page and a declaration that it's not done with search just yet.

Popular Yahoo products such as Mail and Messenger will soon grow more social, allowing users to update their status, share photos with friends, and initiate video calls. In addition, Yahoo Search is about to get a new results page that can connect searchers directly to the Web content they seek without leaving the results page.

"Our user base grows when things are simpler and more delightful," said Elisa Steele, executive vice president and chief marketing officer at Yahoo. The idea is twofold: to attract more people who are not already familiar with Yahoo's content and to entice those who already use products like Yahoo Mail to spend more time on the site. Either way, that's more eyeballs for advertisers.

To that effect, Yahoo hopes to tap into the popularity of social networking by redesigning Yahoo Mail--the leading e-mail service in the world--to feature status updates, links to social content like photo albums, and additional applications such as Evite. The new home page allows Yahoo members to update their status and broadcast that within the Yahoo network, and that box will also be added to the Mail and Messenger experiences.

At the moment, however, those obsessed with social networking are likely already hooked up with the likes of Facebook and Twitter. The status updates that are available through the top of the Yahoo home page and Mail page will only broadcast to those who you've connected with via Yahoo profiles, but at some point Yahoo wants to link that status update box to outside services to allow you to update your status once and broadcast it to multiple networks, said Tapan Bhat, senior vice president of integrated consumer experiences.

Still, there's still an awful lot of people who haven't taken the Twitter plunge, said Bryan Lamkin, senior vice president of applications products. Yahoo wants to have it both ways: to provide a social outlet for Yahoo users who haven't signed up for things like Twitter and to give those Yahoo users already hooked into other social networks a chance to run everything through Yahoo.

And although Yahoo plans to offload its search business to Microsoft at some point over the next several years, it demonstrated a new search results page that can display search results from specific sites that are related to the query. For example, searches for queries such as "how to make sushi" return Wikipedia and eHow links on the left hand side of the page, and searches for people link to results gathered from Facebook or Twitter.

"Searching for people has been Google's domain. We're going to take that away from them," said Larry Cornett, vice president of search products and design.

Many people forget that although Microsoft is set to take over on the back end, Yahoo will retain control of how Bing-powered results are presented on Yahoo pages, said Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Yahoo Labs and search strategy. That means the company will continue to tweak the front-end experience, and from that standpoint could really be considered a competitor of Bing.

"We are not a version of Bing...What we do with (search results), how we paint it, that's entirely up to us," Raghavan said.

Corrected at 2:45 p.m. PDT with the correct spelling of search executive Larry Cornett's name.

Yahoo is still king of the e-mail market as of June 2009, but Gmail has the most momentum.

(Credit: ComScore Media Metrix)

Google's Gmail is the fastest-growing e-mail service on the planet, but it has a way to go to catch Yahoo's still-growing market share.

ComScore's latest figures for the e-mail market show Yahoo added almost 20 million users last year, growing its share of the market by 22 percent from 87.2 million users to 106.2 million users in June. Only Gmail grew faster--a 46-percent clip--but just 36.9 million people are currently using Gmail. Microsoft's Hotmail is the second-most widely used e-mail with 47.1 million users, up 3 percent from last year.

Some outlets, such as TechCrunch, zeroed in on Google's performance, noting that it has now surpassed Web 1.0 stalwart AOL's steadily falling share of the e-mail market. Others, such as Daring Fireball, noted that Google has better mindshare among the digerati than Yahoo or Hotmail.

But Yahoo, currently rebranding itself around content and services after dumping its search business on Microsoft, should be thrilled at 22 percent growth starting from such a large number. Now that Yahoo will be dependent on attracting eyeballs to its vast network of Web content, pushing that content to those logging into Yahoo to check their e-mail becomes extremely important.

Google has had to make some changes as Gmail has grown larger, tweaking the "labels" sorting structure it uses inside Gmail to behave more like the traditional folder-based organization used by other e-mail services. Still, there's no doubt that Gmail has breathed new life into the original killer application for the Internet since it made its debut five years ago, and Yahoo Mail will have to make sure to stay on top of evolving usage patterns to maintain its edge.

New applications for Yahoo Mail, such as this one from PayPal, let you send money right from your inbox without having to visit PayPal's site.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo has added new applications for its users in another step toward giving its users more and more to do from within Yahoo.

The company plans to announce the limited beta of three new Yahoo Mail applications from PayPal, Picnik, and Zumo Drive on Friday. Yahoo Mail users who have indicated an interest in signing up for Yahoo's beta programs will be the first to get a crack at the new services, with the applications coming to the wider user base over the next several months.

It's all part of Yahoo's Open Strategy, designed to let outside developers tap into the company's properties and offer their wares inside Yahoo's network of sites. It's becoming an old story, but the trend these days in the Internet world is the proliferation of large sites like Yahoo, Google, and Facebook as development platforms unto themselves, with application developers spending more and more time writing programs that run on those sites, rather than traditional operating systems.

For example, PayPal's application will let Yahoo Mail users send money to another user by opening a window like a tab in a browser. Picnik, a popular browser-based photo editing tool, will bring that feature to Yahoo Mail in a similar way, letting you open the service right from an e-mail message.

Yahoo is also expanding the Open Strategy to other parts of its portfolio of sites. Wordpress bloggers will be able to post to their blogs from their MyYahoo page, and manage their money with Mint.com's services. And Yahoo TV Widgets will now support searching and viewing of archrival Google's YouTube video collection.

It's taken Yahoo quite some time to put these applications together, first announcing the Yahoo Open Strategy in April 2008 but not taking it live until last December, when it unveiled the first set of applications for Yahoo Mail and the MyYahoo start page. It also appears the company plans to wrap these applications along with forthcoming ones into a redesign of its homepage, which CEO Carol Bartz said this week would arrive "later this fall."

The idea is convenience: letting users get everything they need and want in one place. But the upshot is that by providing incentives to stick around on Yahoo, the company is making it more likely that you'll stumble upon something else at Yahoo, such as an ad or another service that drives a search query: 98 percent of Yahoo's searches come from people who are already on the site.

Yahoo has added a small but useful feature to its Web mail service that lets users filter the contents of their in-box to see only the messages from their contacts. This means that if someone's not on your contacts whitelist, you don't see their message.

Short of Yahoo Mail's built-in filters and its connections sorting, this is one of the simpler ways to cut out any in-box clutter from people you don't know. However, there's some work involved on your part to build that list of contacts. To enable the feature, users must first create a Yahoo profile over at profiles.yahoo.com. Then add people they wish to list as contacts.

Besides sorting by connections, users will soon be able to sort by contacts. Here's what the in-box looks like before the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo )

And here's what it looks like after the sort.

(Credit: Yahoo)

One area where this terminology might confuse users is the difference between "contacts" and "connections." Yahoo Mail's help section refers to connections as "contacts with special status." In the case of mail, what makes them special is that you've interacted with them frequently, so the product assumes you know them. They must also confirm you as a contact before a connection is made. Contacts, on the other hand must be manually added, either through mail, or over on Yahoo's profiles site.

Yahoo Mail's senior product manager Rick Pal says this feature will only be available for Yahoo Mail users in the U.S. and Australia, and won't be rolling out to all accounts until a "few weeks" from now.

Update: Made a clarification on the difference between contacts and connections.

Previously: Yahoo puts meat on Open Strategy bones

A "small fraction" of Yahoo Mail users couldn't get to their e-mail Thursday, the company said.

The outage affected less than 0.5 percent of users for less than 20 minutes, Yahoo said. "The problem has now been resolved," the company said.

Yahoo Mail has 280 million users worldwide, according to ComScore, so even small outages can affect many people. Yahoo isn't the only company to have recent blemishes on its record: Comcast had an e-mail outage on Saturday, and Google's Gmail went down in February.

Most e-mail programs and Web-based e-mail services present mail in reverse chronological order so that the most recent message is always on top, on a line all by itself. Gmail sort of organizes mail chronologically but it does so it in "conversations" so that messages, responses and responses to responses all wind up within the same message, which may or may not show up on top, even if it's the most recent message to arrive.

In an interview, Gmail product manager Todd Jackson told me that users prefer that interface and, while I've never done a scientific survey, I'm quite sure that some people do prefer that interface to the more traditional one that's used by Outlook, Yahoo Mail and most other mail services. But I know I'm far from the only Gmail user who at least wants the option to look at mail purely chronologically.

It seems to me that it wouldn't be all that hard for Google to give people a choice of how they want to see their mail. Google Labs has come up with all sorts of other options for Gmail that range from the very useful to the downright silly, and it strikes me that an option of letting people see their most recent message on top would be pretty popular.

Jackson acknowledged that others have made such a request but says that "it's not in the top five" on their list of popular requests.

Workarounds

There are a couple of roundabout ways to get your Gmail in pure chronological order. One is to click on Settings followed by "Forwarding and POP/IMAP to configure Gmail so that it can be accessed via Outlook, Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook Express, or any other e-mail program. Another--and I know this sounds weird--is to also set up a free Yahoo account and forward your Gmail to Yahoo Mail. That way you get Gmail's amazing archiving feature and superior spam filters with the option to view your mail chronologically in Yahoo Mail.

Back to the love side of the equation, Gmail does have some tools that make it easier to find important mail including labels and filters that allow you to highlight mail from certain people or domains. To avoid missing messages that could impact my career, any Gmail I get from colleagues at CBS News and CNET, for example, are highlighted with a red VIP label. I've set things up so that mail from my bank, credit card companies and investment firm get a green label with the word "Financial."

Gmail labels let you highlight important mail

For instructions on how to use labels and filters see Google's excellent video tutorial and for more about the past and future evolution of Gmail check out Stephen Shankland's recent interview with Todd Jackson.

Correction at 7:55 a.m. PST: Googlesystem is not an official Google blog.

Google has inked a deal with online account migration tool provider TrueSwitch in an attempt to streamline the process of moving to Gmail from competing e-mail services, according to Googlesystem, a third-party blog that tracks the search giant's efforts.

Gmail has previously offered tools that let people import contacts and messages from other e-mail services, but the company apparently believed it was making it too hard on new users to import data and wanted to find a way to make account migration more straightforward.

According to the Googlesystem blog, people can use the TrueSwitch migration tool to bring in all their data from AOL Mail, Yahoo Mail, MSN's Hotmail, and other services.

The TrueSwitch migration feature is being added to Gmail's Settings menu. After inputting the e-mail address of the account they would like to import, users will be asked to enter that account's password and decide what they want imported. They will also be able to label the imported messages to distinguish e-mails sent to the old account and those sent to their new Gmail account. It will take 24 hours to 48 hours before the messages appear in Gmail.

Using TrueSwitch could significantly lower the barriers to switching to Gmail. Some Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users are loath to switch to Gmail and lose their data, so they instead decide to stay put.

The TrueSwitch import tool apparently is being rolled out over the next few days, though it's not clear when it will be available to all users.