Yahoo Tries To Make Email More Social - Digits - WSJ: “After the Yahoo and Bing tie up it seems yahoo is focussing in what it calls its “core competency” very seriously . Yahoo is upgrading its popular Web-based email with social networking integration of the features that make Yahoo mail look a lot more like another social networksing site like Facebook,twitter and flickr combined into one.Among a host of changes to Yahoo’s online services, Yahoo’s mail homepage will now feature updates on what the friends in your address book are sharing about themselves online – including status updates they’ve posted, photos they’ve shared, and their birthdays. The new mail page will also show the most recent emails just from the people you select as your “connections” – Yahoo’s term for “friends.”

Yahoo began unveiling some of its social “connections” capabilities several months ago to people in the U.S. and Australia. Now social email will roll out to all of Yahoo’s users over the next four weeks.“Listening to our users talk about how they want to manage their online lives,” said John Kremer, the vice president of Yahoo Mail, “they are asking us to bring this stuff together and make it easier to consume their world.”

In another nod to being more social, Yahoo has enhanced its email service’s photo organizing and sharing capabilities. Incorporating technology from Xoopit, a startup that Yahoo bought a few weeks ago, Yahoo mail will now come with a “My Photos” app that scans all of your emails for photos that have been attached or shared through services such as flickr, and collects them into one virtual scrapbook. From there, you can organize the photos and send them along to other friends. Yahoo also increased the attachment limit for emailing photos from 10MB to 25MB.Yahoo says a forthcoming app from online invitations service Evite will also integrate right into its email service, enabling people to add attendees from their own contacts list and update calendars.

Many popular online services are encroaching on each other’s territory in the effort to become the preferred destination for uber-connected lives. Last week, for example, Facebook announced a feature that
enables administrators of Facebook pages to publish updates to their Twitter accounts automatically.”However I am not sure if all users would ideally want to show off all their status updates to their connections across their networks. Also with a plethora of social networking sites,which already gives you so much information about your connections. Email was probably the last bastion of privacy where users could actually spend some time secluded and isolated amidst all the distraction of social updates.