In this article, Yahoo! announces that it will launch new features to its free email service to enhance their product. It will add features that are commonly use by social networking sites (e.g Facebook, Myspace, etc). Some of these features include: creating social interactive communities with the help of their email (based on friends and interests), sort emails of friends/family separately, it will allow you to add third party applications to the emails, and it will scoop up buried pictures from old emails. With this new look, Yahoo! is trying to appeal to a new set of consumers. They are trying to reach to the people who do not engage into social networking sites, but have tons of memories (pictures) in their emails. Furthermore, they are pursuing the idea of interactivity between their users. With all of these cool new changes Yahoo! is obviously trying to become the most popular launching site.
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20081216/tc_afp/usitinternetyahoo