'Integrated networking site should work for us'

IN CONVERSATION

John Kremer, vice-president (Yahoo Mail), perceives Yahoo's homepage re-design to be a step towards realising MyYahoo.

The company essentially wants to move from a page model to a more interactive model. Even orherwise, making its presence felt in social networks and broadening its base on a regional level tops Yahoo's priority chart, he reveals in an interview with Priyanka Joshi

Google's sites had 528 million visitors worldwide in March 2007, according to ComScore Inc, followed by Microsoft with 527 million, while Yahoo had 476.3 million visitors. Is this satisfactory or you have plans to increase traffic to your sites?

Yahoo is ready with a new social-networking service that would let you update and play around with your friends' profiles.

Our ambition is not to make a standalone social network to compete with the Facebooks and MySpaces of the online world. Instead, photo management, blogging and private communication will be offloaded on to Yahoo's web tools like mail. Imagine a layer on top of our various web services, tying them together with a social glue.

For example, it would be possible that a user will log into Yahoo Mail and see his profile along with all of friends' profiles in their contact list. The users are given the option to leave their profile open to friends, allowing them to add modules like widgets or games.

We also plan to increase video and television-like content on our home page. Yahoo Mail is already integrating RSS and there are more personalised instant messaging features coming.

Before Google's entry, Yahoo owned the web. Now, Yahoo has been relegated to the number two position. Can Yahoo catch up with Google?

We are leaders in email and were the first groups to embrace Internet-based tools that allowed users to collaborate and share online content. Two years ago we acquired Flickr.com, which allows users to share photographs. Then we launched Yahoo Answers, which allows users to submit queries on any topic to a community of users.

In a nutshell, our ability to launch a social networking tool, that can integrate all the existing services right at the Mail homepage should be the clincher for us in 2008.

Google has changed the concept of web email. How has Yahoo faired in creating a new paradigm for web email?

Our brand new version of web mail services does away with texting woes, giving people around the world more ways to connect.

With the new Yahoo Mail, people can send and receive free text messages in their e-mail to and from any mobile phone number in participating markets including the US, Canada, India, and the Philippines. Yahoo Mail is more responsive than it was during beta testing, that it includes advanced search options for sifting through e-mail messages.

Yahoo Mail will now be available Hindi too. This is a huge step from Yahoo to localise and cater to country-specific needs. Users are now being offered the option to write and read e-mail in Hindi.

You think text messaging will lift Yahoo Mail's flat growth rate?

I think, it will. At Yahoo, innovation is a key driver for our product development and so the Yahoo Mail in Hindi is relevant to the 200 million Indians who are expected to come online in the next few years. This would also be an attractive product for a large section of advertisers, who would like to reach out to the non-English speaking Indian population.

We want our users to be able to choose how they communicate with their friends and family, in the most appropriate method for the moment. By adding these new types of real-time communication into Yahoo! Mail, we're laying the foundation for an even more social experience for our users.