Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.
The last time checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year, when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent). → Read More
Yahoo gathered a small group of bloggers, press and others at Sauce in San Francisco tonight to announce the launch of two new RSS products. They have integrated an RSS reader directly into Yahoo Mail Beta, and are expanding Alerts to include RSS feeds. These are significant new products, aimed squarely at new and mainstream RSS users. The service is not live as of the time I am posting this. I’ve added a screen shot picture from the live demo. Mail Yahoo has deeply integrated RSS into the Yahoo Mail beta experience. Directly below the email folders are “RSS folders”. Clicking on the top folder show all posts in a “river of news” format, meaning all posts for all subscribed feeds are listed in the order they have appeared in feeds. Each feed also has its own folder, allowing the user to read feeds individually (more like bloglines). A post from any feed is treated exactly like an email – any post can be forwarded as an email or dragged into a folder and saved. All of the great AJAX functionality already working in Yahoo’s Mail beta works with the new RSS functionality as well. Adding feeds is straightforward – include the feed URL or choose from a number of popular feeds. Alerts Yahoo users can now use Yahoo Alerts to be notified whenever RSS feeds update. Alerts, which include a summary of the updated content, can be configured to be sent via sms, email and/or messenger. This is a great way to monitor small groups of important feeds. Yahoo clearly took the lead for best email application this evening. The ability to “pop in” other email accounts, the ajax functionality and, now, the integrated RSS reader are absolutely stunning features. John Furrier was at the event tonight as well, and as usual has an exclusive podcast. UPDATE: RSS in Yahoo Mail is now fully live. As Jeff Clavier says, My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail syncronize feeds – a long list in email doesn’t work so well in My Yahoo. I spoke to Scott Gatz at Yahoo about this earlier this evening and he says they’ll find a fix for it. There are a few other features which still need to be added, but Yahoo Mail is just an incredibly awesome product. → Read More
