Yahoo! has introduced new features for its popular web-based email program, including software that allows computer users to type text messages on a keyboard and send them directly to someone’s cellphone.
The enhancements make it easier to send email, instant messages or SMSs from a single website — no need to launch or toggle between separate applications or devices. It will take up to six weeks for all the new features to become available to all 254-million Yahoo! Mail subscribers in 21 languages worldwide.
The most obvious beneficiaries will be parents, who will be able to use their keyboards to type messages sent to their children’s cellphones — no thumb-twisting typing on a dial pad, said Yahoo! vice-president John Kremer.
”We’re giving you the right way to connect at the right time with right person,” said Kremer, whose two preteen sons vastly prefer SMSs and instant messages to email.
The changes come amid fierce competition among providers of free, web-based email services. Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Hotmail have long dominated the niche, but Google’s Gmail has grown quickly since its introduction in April 2004.
In February, Yahoo! announced that it would provide unlimited storage space, and earlier this month Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft said Hotmail would increase free storage from two to five gigabytes. Time Warner’s AOL, the fourth-largest email provider, began offering unlimited storage last summer. Google provides nearly three gigabytes.
Sunnyvale-based Yahoo! bills the changes as the most significant overhaul of Yahoo! Mail since its launch in 1997. The new version replaces a one-year-old beta program and adds new features, including text messaging, a more comprehensive email search engine, and a contacts database that is easier to read and edit.
Users who do not want the upgrades — or whose computers are too slow to handle them — can opt to remain with the current version, which Yahoo! will call ”Classic”.
The new version allows users to click on a contact and then select whether to send that person an email, instant message or SMS.
You could send an email or instant message if you know the recipient is at the computer — or an SMS if the recipient is on the road with a cellphone.
”This gives people the ability to reach anybody in their contact database any time,” said Mike McGuire, vice-president of research at industry analysis firm Gartner. ”For good or evil, it’s going to be much easier for anybody to get a hold of you.” — Sapa-AP