David Berube’s OLD Blog

I reported earlier today that Yahoo Mail was going to release an API tomorrow. Ryan Kennedy just confirmed in a comment on that post, that it launched it late tonight. The announcement can be found here.

While we are certainly proud of the success of Yahoo! Mail, today we are announcing how we are going beyond the boundaries of the Yahoo! network and enabling developers to build new tools or applications around Yahoo! Mail. We are thrilled to announce the open availability of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, web service for Yahoo! Mail (accessible via SOAP or JSON-RPC) that we previewed to Yahoo! Hack Day attendees. With the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, you can connect to the core mail platform to perform typical mailbox tasks for premium users such as list messages and folders, and compose and send messages (you can also build mail preview tools for free users with limited Web Service functionality). In other words, developers outside of Yahoo! can now build mail tools or applications on the same infrastructure we use to build the highly-scaled Yahoo! Mail service that serves nearly 250 million Yahoo! Mail users today

Yahoo is also offering commissions to developers who build applications targeted at their premium email users. They’ll give you $10 for every new Yahoo Mail plus account that gets referred to them from your application. I like this step, it will produce some creative results, and probably quickly.

Here is a short screencast with Ryan Kennedy as he explains more about the API:

Here is Lee Culver at Yahoo Hack Day demonstrating her Flickr Postcard hack which is using Yahoo Mail Web Services:

Once again, this is a big step forward by Yahoo, and it will certainly be interesting to see how Gmail will respond, if they will at all. Yahoo Mail makes its revenue from premium account holders, while Google makes it through targeted ads around your email.Couple this with the recent announcement from Yahoo that they are giving away unlimited space, they are looking to remain on the top of the email world, and it will be hard for their competitors to catch up anytime soon.

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