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Yahoo wants to make its Web e-mail service a place you never want to–or more importantly–have to leave to get your social fix. The company on Wednesday is releasing an overhauled version of its Yahoo Mail Beta client that it says is twice as fast as the previous version, while managing to tack on new [...]

SUNNYVALE, Calif.–Yahoo made some key changes to one of its most important products today, rolling out a new look for Yahoo Mail. Blake Irving, the company’s new executive vice president and chief products officer, unveiled the new design at Yahoo’s headquarters here during an event optimistically called “Product Runway.” Yahoo said that its 281 million [...]

One of the best features in the Thunderbird remix called Postbox was the deep and fluid integration of social networking contacts into the desktop e-mail client. Thunderbird itself has begun to get a taste of that power with Thunderbird Contacts, a version of Mozilla Contacts, a Firefox add-on that made the browser more socially aware. [...]

It was only a matter of time, but three months after acquiring Web-based photo editor Picnik, Google has gotten around to integrating the service into Picasa Web Albums. Now, if a Picasa Web Albums user wants to make a quick edit to a photo, they can do so without leaving the photo page. Previously a [...]

“If you build it, they will come” isn’t always enough. Sometime you have to let somebody else build on your foundation. That’s what Google is now doing with Gmail, letting Google Apps customers add various third-party applications that integrate with the e-mail service. “Starting today, third-party developers can build Gmail contextual gadgets and distribute them [...]

Yahoo continues to inject social networking into its services. Starting later on Monday, Yahoo Mail users will be able to update their Facebook status from their Yahoo Mail in-box. Facebook users will be able to log into their accounts right from the Yahoo Mail home page and will also be able to click through to [...]

Google is getting ready to add social-networking features into Gmail as it attempts to jump-start its social Web strategy. Gmail users can already set their status within the service, but Google plans to expand that into a stream of status updates found in services like Facebook and Twitter, according to sources familiar with the company’s [...]

Mark Zuckerberg should be proud: The top search term of 2009, according to Experian Hitwise, was not “porn,” “poker,” or “Britney Spears.” It was, for the first time, “Facebook.” In 2008, Facebook had been the tenth most searched term on the Web, according to the traffic company’s annual survey of search queries. The rest of [...]