Yahoo Adds More Facebook Features to Email
For more than a year, Yahoo has been adding social features to make its email platform look more like Facebook; now, it's rolling out a change that just brings part of Facebook itself to Yahoo mail. — The move is another step in Yahoo's attempt …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the latest move in a strategy Yahoo has been executing since at least 2007, when the WSJ asked whether social features could make email sexy again and the Inbox 2.0 idea of turning webmail into a social network was first floated. Yahoo's own steps have been incremental: social elements on Yahoo Buzz in 2008, then a contact-sync between the two address books in March 2010 (Facebook Friends: Meet Yahoo! Contacts) followed weeks later by Facebook status updates inside Mail.
What changes with this rollout is the degree of dependence: rather than imitating Facebook feature by feature, Yahoo is importing part of Facebook itself into the inbox. The timing is awkward — it lands mid-privacy-backlash, with confirmed reports of security bugs and a tumultuous month of public criticism aimed at Facebook throughout May 2010.
First-order effects
- Yahoo Mail users get native access to part of Facebook without leaving their inbox, completing a March-to-May sequence that turned Mail into a Facebook surface rather than merely a Facebook lookalike.
- Facebook gains a distribution point inside one of the largest webmail bases, extending its reach to users at the moment they check personal correspondence.
Second-order effects
- The privacy controversy engulfing Facebook in May 2010 now attaches to Yahoo's flagship product: every Mail user exposed to embedded Facebook features becomes a potential critic of both companies at once.
- Google's rival webmail operation, named alongside Yahoo in the original Inbox 2.0 reporting, faces pressure to answer with equivalent embedded-social functionality or concede the 'inbox as social hub' framing Yahoo is staking out.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, portal-era incumbents stop building proprietary social graphs and instead rent reach from whoever owns one — making the social network the upstream supplier and the mailbox a downstream channel whose value depends on a partner's reputation.
- That dependency structure means a partner's governance failures — Facebook's confirmed rash of security bugs and ongoing privacy-debate fallout — become the distributor's problem, an early instance of platform risk migrating across company boundaries.
The trend: Webmail is evolving from a closed product that copies competitors' features into an open surface that embeds them, shifting power over the inbox experience to the social networks being embedded.