The Yahoo Search Blog briefly explained “you’ll find a faster email search using Yahoo’s wealth of search science and technology.” The new left-hand column has added navigation to sort and narrow your search results by sender, attachment file, date, or folder location.

Other improvements to Yahoo mail are underlying speed improvements, better spam prevention, sleeker mobile experience, and social, photo and video integration. For more information, see http://features.mail.yahoo.com/.

Here is a video demo:

Some of the informal comments and conversations that immediately followed the 90-minute discussion were along the lines of “We’ve heard this before, what’s new?” or “Where’s the vision?”

During the Q&A portion of the session Irving stumbled a bit when asked by the BBC’s Maggie Shields to sum up what Yahoo was in a sentence. He rattled off a list of things.

Indeed, Irving had said during his opening, “People have seen Yahoo as disassociated set of verticals. Going forward there’s going to be ‘one Yahoo.’ You’re going to see us transition to an on network and off network player — something that you take with you and not as much as a place where you go.”

This sort of thing has been said before (remember YOS?).

During his opening remarks Irving laid out some elements (literally as a periodic table) of Yahoo’s “new” strategy:

• Building an ecosystem outside the Yahoo network: both ads and content. Irving suggests that Yahoo might create a “content exchange” like the RightMedia ads exchange. There will also be a focus on third party sites
• Personal relevance through data. Irving says 50% of Yahoo’s 600 million log in. “We are going to be striving for 100% authentication over the next three years.” (By honoring OpenID and not just Yahoo IDs.)
• Be where the consumer is (mobile and tablets will be equally important)
• Social: own real social relationships on the web. He implies that Yahoo’s social strategy involves smaller groups than large public networks
• Best in class services: Irving asserts that this is Yahoo’s challenge/task across devices

Beyond these principles, Irving previewed a few specifics: a rebuilt Yahoo Mail with speed and design improvements, some search UI changes that would be more visually pleasing and enable users to “act” on search results more than today. Irving said, “We’re going to bring you as close to that ‘answer’ as possible” (including conducting transactions from the search results page).

There was also a brief visual tease of a forthcoming iPad app for Yahoo that looked pretty nicely designed.

After Irving, CTO Raymie Stata got up and talked about bringing a “search mindset” to the whole of Yahoo and infusing everything being done with “big science” to generate “awesome experiences.” He went on to discuss Yahoo’s architecture and infrastructure, saying that many changes had been made to lay the groundwork for a “faster, more iterative” approach to product development going forward (to use Irving’s words).

Though both men were passionate and articulate the discussion felt a bit like a meal without the entree. But then I went into the hall, which not everyone did, and saw some of the product demos and talked to some of the product people about specifics. After those conversations my perception of things changed considerably.

Reporters who wrote their stories “in the room” without the benefit of seeing the demos only heard what sounded like a familiar aspirational speech. But if you actually saw some of the product specifics it put some interesting “meat on the bones” of Irving and Stata’s general remarks.

Asked to discuss my reactions immediately following the press conference, I told the BBC that Yahoo has “strong products and strong content but they don’t have . . . . products that have gotten people excited.” I told the Wall Street Journal that “They need to show up with sexy, exciting stuff to regain some of their old credibility.” These were my immediate, quick reactions to the general and short-on-specifics speeches. But I felt differently after speaking to the product people.

Out in the hall I saw:

• A new version of Yahoo Messenger than includes a “Face Time” like PC-to-smartphone video chat capability
• A better looking and seemingly faster Yahoo Mail
• A very well-designed version of Yahoo for the iPad (nothing like the browser version) that was visually rich and capable of customization
• Some impressive new rich media ad units
• A much improved version of Yahoo Groups that was visually more pleasing and seemingly more useful
• A partly new search interface with some intriguing possibilities, including the presentation of rich display ads in the “accordion” module at the top of results:

Yahoo Search SVP Shashi Seth told me that this accordion module, which allows users to quickly browse through information, was testing very well and would be coming this fall. Whether you like it or not personally it’s the kind of thing that Yahoo has said it was going to do in the post-Bing era: innovate on top of the Microsoft index.

I came away from these and a couple of other discussions thinking (in contrast to my immediate remarks) maybe Yahoo doesn’t need a single big vision. Maybe that’s not possible given Yahoo’s legacy. Instead, maybe it just needs to do what it does already but do it better and update it more frequently. In other words make its products better and easier to use and bring out improvements more rapidly. (There are some who might argue it has lost some of the engineering talent required to do so.)

Yet this is precisely what Blake Irving said that Yahoo would do now: “iterate more rapidly.” In a sense Yahoo doesn’t need lots of flashy new stuff so much as it needs to stop neglecting some of the assets it already owns. That was acknowledged to me several times in my demo-related conversations. Yahoo Groups is a case-in-point.

Yahoo says it has 10 million groups, with a total of 115 million users globally. By comparison, MySpace officially claims just over 120 million users globally (though “active” users may be fewer). Groups was a social network of sorts before there were social networks.

Yahoo has in the past tried to turn Mail into a social network but Yahoo Groups is already a version of what Google has been considering around smaller sets of connections; it has just been long neglected. A better designed and more functional Yahoo Groups, which is what I saw, could represent a major avenue into “social networking” and it’s already there.

I’m not entirely reversing myself here. I do think that new and exciting products would help Yahoo. But I also believe that if Yahoo can do a better job of developing what it already has it can not only retain but grow usage and regain some of its lost “mojo” — whatever that is exactly.

2:00pm: Title of the introductory slide is “Connecting You To What Matters Most”.

2:04pm: Still waiting to begin, not sure what the delay is.

2:06pm: The conference room manager said she is still trying to find the presenter, if you know where he is, press a certain key combination. I have never seen this happen with such a big conference bridge.

2:09pm: Kryssa Guntrum, the presenter is typing in the chat room, just waiting for him to get on the phone portion.

2:10pm: They are starting now…. They have “significant enhancements” to their most popular products, said Elisa Steele, CMO.

2:12pm: Yahoo’s vision is to be the center of people’s lives. Core to this is to be:

(1) Personally relevant

(2) Human relevance by connecting people

(3) Technology and science

(4) Having fun by making things fun and easier to use

2:14pm: Execution of this vision, i.e. to be the center of people’s lives. Nothing better shows this than Yahoo’s new home page, which brings what you want to the front. This is more than customization and personalized, it is about users taking control and Yahoo allowing users to bring the best of the web to you. You can choose ESPN or Yahoo Sports, or Twitter or whatever is relevant to you.

2:15pm: The user experience must be predictable.

2:16pm: Bryan Lamkin, SVP, Applications to talk about Yahoo’s Applications Update is now up.

2:17pm: Bryan Lamkin at Yahoo for four months now, he has been at Adobe for 14 years, working on Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. And what he did there can help Yahoo at a larger scale.

2:19pm: Yahoo is a great starting point for the web. Defining an integrated experience is important. They have a great set of technology. Bryan’s job is to deliver this great experience. His goal is to make sure you choose Yahoo’s properties within the Yahoo portal. Such as enhancements in Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search and Yahoo Mobile products.

2:20pm: What do people need on the web? (1) Easy way to check in on the people and info that matters to them. One central place for this. (2) Simple tools to navigate to the sites they need most. (3) A view into what is happening in the rest of the world.

2:21pm: Yahoo wants to bridge that world together as the world gets more complicated.

2:25pm: 4 components to designing these core applications include: (1) Rich media (i.e. video, Flickr, etc) (2) Smart services (i.e. mail and messenger, a workflow system for your Yahoo mail to be shown later) (3) Convergence across different communication protocols, different applications and Yahoo is expected to break down those walls. (4) Anytime, anywhere. You need access no matter where you are (i.e. mobile apps).

2:26pm: Yahoo Mail demo by John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail

2:30pm: Yahoo mail is not only about email only, it is about social communications:

Notice the middle panel where you can read mail from the people that matter to you the most. “Recent unread emails from contacts.” Also notice the “Confirm to Get Updates” on the bottom right.

2:34pm: You can add folders of images to a sent email and then edit those photos in the mail (delete, rotate, etc) and you have up to 25MB of space per email:

2:37pm: Integrated MyPhotos application allows you to share photos and photos you share automatically get connected to your friends:

2:40pm: Yahoo is adding an evite application, which isn’t available today, but will be eventually. It auto-fills from the Yahoo address book:

Also, you can easily add this to your calendar:

2:42pm: Yahoo also releasing a mobile version of Yahoo Mail…

Features: 1 click access to read, compose, etc. Read access to word, excel, etc, and one click sync.

2:44pm: Dave Merriwether, Sr. Director of Yahoo Messenger is now up for a demo. New beta releasing today, globally.

2:45pm: One feature change is ability to change the language without redownloading a new app (16 languages):

2:46pm: You have search assist built right in:

2:47pm: Change weather to a location and the local news changes also:

2:49pm: More social details including overlays and a “Y! Updates” tab in messenger:

2:50pm: Rich media with video chat and also sharing photos in the window:

2:52pm: Larry Cornett, VP of Search Products and Design is now up to talk about Search.

2:53pm: New Yahoo search design, makes it easier to find and explore things that matter most to you.

2:54pm: Why are they making this change?

Aligned with new look and feel of yahoo home page. Gives more personally relevant experience to your search. Plus quicker access to search features available within Yahoo Search (old features, more in front). Search Monkey has been structuring the web, and they are bringing those back into the search experience.

2:55pm: The new Yahoo Search framework:

The most change is on the left column…

2:57pm: The left column explained:

Search Apps, such as McCafee, for safe search features. Also, to display SearchPad. Site Filters, Filter results by sites people love for that query (such as, Wikipedia, Twitter, Flickr, eHow and other very popular sites) Data filters, using Search Monkey to pull out the structured (“objects”) data Assistance, like search assist that you see at the top of the page, but this is more personalized search suggestions.

3:00pm: Demo time, here are screens:

I can see this myself, here is a sharper screen capture:

3:04pm: We will take away “searching for people” from Google’s domain:

3:07pm: Now he is showing off related concepts to show power of personalized search suggestions:

First searches for car related terms, i.e. toyota, honda, then jaguar.

Then I go into animal searches:

Note related concepts at bottom left.

3:09pm: Calculator and magic 8 ball app:

3:10pm: Yahoo Search integration with search assist in other Yahoo properties:

3:12pm: Prabhakar Raghavan, SVP of Yahoo Labs and Search Strategy is now up to talk about matching content to people.

They need to pull out the right piece of content for each user, depending on the person requesting it. Once they figure out the right content for the right person, how do they display that content the best way for the user.

3:15pm: Science and Technology through machine learning via content optimization. The algorithms look at what people are reading, clicking on, when the content expires and so on. The idea is to figure out what content to show on the home page and drives higher click through rate.

3:17pm: Social Science through measuring audience engagement metrics, i.e. pageviews and clicks. But looking forward, Yahoo needs to go beyond those metrics. A pageview on search is very different than a pageview on mail. So what are the right metrics to gauge these for advertisers?

3:19pm: Economics in pricing theory and option theory, through ad optimization. There are challenges of scale with these marketplaces.

3:21pm: Search through web of objects, as opposed to “web of pages.” It is no longer about how many pages you can index, but how many objects you can understand on the web.

That is the scientific investment on Yahoo’s side.

3:23pm: Q&A Time. It is very hard to hear the questions, will listen and add anything I can hear that is important to search.

Someone asked about how Microsoft’s deal impacts the search side. Yahoo answered that Yahoo will innovate on the front end, not on the backend gathering of web pages, but on how the information is displayed to users and personalized based on the data Yahoo has.

Does the Microsoft deal distract from Yahoo’s Search strategy? Um, how do you think Yahoo will answer this. :)

This is funny, the same Q comes up time and time again, if Microsoft is doing search, why are you doing this? Yahoo keeps saying, they control the front end of those results. Not sure if the media understand that, and if they cannot, will searchers understand that?

ETA for launch: Later this year, but current under test mode.

Postscript: See Yahoo’s New Search Clothes — But Will It Help? (Probably Not) for a longer look at the Yahoo search changes.

Yahoo, for its part, is pursuing a “smarter inbox” strategy, which has a social media dimension. As part of executing on that strategy it has acquired Xoopit, which developed photo-sharing for Yahoo Mail and GMail (although that will likely come to an end). The estimated value of the deal was $20 million. According to the Yodel Anecdotal blog:

With the integration of Xoopit’s platform technology and capabilities, the task of sending photos via email will be as easy as it should be and sharing photo albums with friends and family members will also be a cinch. You’ll be able to share your pictures among a group of friends or family like never before – combining pictures from numerous sources into a single album for a private group to view. And soon your inbox will become an organized photo index as well . . . Why is this such a big deal? Yahoo! Mail is actually home to one of the largest online photo repositories in the world.

Here’s how Xoopit described itself at the company’s launch in early 2008:

[Xoopit] bring[s] the power of the social web to email by combining the benefits of social networks and media management within email environments. Xoopit finds the pictures, videos, and files buried in webmail’s gigabytes of free storage and allows users to share, comment, and post them to their contacts on other social networks and blogs.

According to Hitwise, Yahoo Mail contributes more than 30 percent of Yahoo’s overall traffic and is a bigger property than the homepage:

Gigaom reached out to comScore to see what exactly Yahoo is number one at and that includes:

• News
• Finance
• Sports
• Mail
• Entertainment
• Games (near tie)

Yahoo Answers is not mentioned here, but I believe they dominate that category, as well.

We don’t often discuss Yahoo’s other properties, but it is important to note that although Yahoo is a distant second to Google in search, Yahoo does dominate the web in so many other ways.

For Yahoo Mail users in the U.S., new apps include PayPal for sending and receiving money, Picnik for photo editing from your In box, MyPhotos for photo organization and sharing, and ZumoDrive, a file sharing service. These mail apps are only available for a limited number of users of the new Yahoo mail. You can get the new apps here.

New apps available to My Yahoo users include WordPress, Mint.com for financial management, and What’s Cookin for recipes and meal ideas. These are available in the My Yahoo content gallery.

Yahoo has also announced new widgets for its Yahoo Connected TV service and for Zimbra, its email and collaboration tool.

Here are the breakdowns:

• Yahoo! Mail – The Yahoo! Mail smarter inbox experience is the company’s largest-scale implementation of its Y!OS initiative. The new experience surfaces messages, information and activity from people users care about most, and the integration of relevant third party applications allows users to be more productive, all from within their inbox.
• My Yahoo! – Beginning today, My Yahoo! users can add applications built by developers using the Yahoo! Application Platform to their personal start pages. Beginning with a limited selection of featured applications, the My Yahoo! content gallery will expand over time to include a wide variety of useful, interactive applications that can be used on My Yahoo! and in the future, other Yahoo! properties.
• Yahoo! Toolbar – Available for a sneak preview beginning later this week at toolbar.yahoo.com, the new Yahoo! Toolbar provides constant access to essential online tasks and up-to-the-minute news from the people that matter most.
• Yahoo! Updates – Starting today, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Toolbar, Yahoo! Music, Yahoo! TV, and Yahoo! Travel will join a number of other Yahoo! properties that already integrate or share relevant activity Updates. Yahoo! Updates enable Yahoo! users to have visibility into the online activities of their connections across the Yahoo! network.

More details at Techmeme, Yodel Anecdotal, Yahoo Developer Network, Yahoo Mail Blog and My Yahoo Blog.

John Kremer, VP of Yahoo Mail, says future plans include integration with other Yahoo properties such as Flickr and Upcoming.org, as well as auto-synching with Microsoft Outlook and Apple’s iPhone. Yahoo has published a video demonstration of the new calendar service.

Yahoo is accepting sign-ups for the beta version of their new calendar at http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com/.

There’s more coverage on Techmeme.

Here’s what Hansell says about Google’s plans:

When I talked recently with Joe Kraus, who runs Google’s OpenSocial project, he said: “We believe there are opportunities with iGoogle to make it more social.” And when I pressed him about the relationship between the social aspects of iGoogle and Gmail versus Orkut or some other social network, he said, “It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand.”

We’re left to “read the tea leaves” a bit there and figure out how some of these properties might be tied in together. iGoogle has been gradually becoming more “social,” as has Google as a whole, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see profiles tied into iGoogle and iGoogle tied to mail and so on. Orkut, which has been growing, suffers from what might be called “the Froogle problem.”

Despite its clever name, many people never fully recognized that Froogle was Google Shopping. So Google eventually changed the name of Froogle to Google Product Search. Such a functional name change might be in order for Orkut too, especially as part of the larger effort that Hansell’s post suggests.

Here’s what Hansell says about Yahoo’s plans:

Yahoo is testing a method that can automatically determine the strength of your relationship to someone by how often you exchange e-mail and instant messages with him or her….

Yahoo Mail will also be extended to display other information about your friends as well. This can be a link to a profile page, and also what Yahoo calls “vitality” –- updated information much like the news feed on Facebook. There could also be simple features that are common on social networks, like displaying a list of friends whose birthdays are coming up….

There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0, [Garlinghouse] said. For people who use a lot of Yahoo services, this profile could be quite rich even at the beginning, as it can draw on activity on Yahoo Music, Yahoo Shopping and so on….

It seems like there is too much complexity here, leading to potential confusion. Yahoo Mail is a huge asset for the company (and so is/was MyYahoo), but there may be too much of a good thing in this vision. Of course, it’s mostly informed speculation in Hansell’s post.

There is probably a growing need for a kind of “dashboard” or “control center” where people get feeds and content, organize favorites, present their resume or profile, and communicate with each other. There’s no single entity or site that does all these things.

Personal startpages/newsreaders/widget containers include Netvibes, Pageflakes, iGoogle, and MyYahoo. Yahoo’s Delicious and MyWeb, among others, are good social bookmarking sites that help organize content for future consumption (and sharing). And sites like LinkedIn or Facebook offer profiles and personal pages.

There may well be a way for Google or Yahoo to bring these elements together in an elegant way — a kind of personal portal or uber-startpage — but if not done correctly or well, it could wreck a relatively good thing, at least in the case of Yahoo Mail.

It’s like that old joke: What’s a camel? A horse designed by committee. There’s more discussion at Techmeme.

As the Yodel Anecdotal blog points out, this enables a new form of intergenerational communication: parents sending text messages to their kids’ mobile phones from their traditional Yahoo email accounts: We already have great integrated instant messaging features in Yahoo! Mail, so adding text messaging was a natural next step. It’s an increasingly popular way to keep in touch, especially among younger users. In fact, 69% of US mobile phone users between the ages of 18-39 use text messaging (Harris Interactive, June 2006), and half of Americans age 18-25 say they sent or received a text message over the phone in the past day (Pew Research Center, January 2007).

While that’s an amusing anecdote/use case, it illustrates the larger principle of Web-mobile integration that will become standard — and increasingly strategic for companies like Yahoo. This SMS integration and the other upgrades being rolled out also help maintain Yahoo Mail’s dominant position on the desktop. (Yahoo Mail is a big source of display ad inventory for the company).

Techmeme offers lots of coverage and discussion.