If you’ve ever wanted to send money via Paypal without leaving your email In box, or if you wanted to publish a blog post without leaving your My Yahoo page, today’s announcement from Yahoo is sure to put a smile on your face. Yahoo is adding a number of third-party apps and widgets to several of its properties, including the popular Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo services.

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.

The Yahoo Search Blog announced that Yahoo will be discontinuing MyWeb, a way to save search results or other Yahoo data to a single location. MyWeb launched in 2005, as part of Yahoo’s vision for a “very individual Web.”

On March 18, 2009, the service will be closed down. Yahoo is asking you to switch to either Yahoo Bookmarks or Delicious and explains how to export or migrate your data to these services.

May I dare ask, is Yahoo is finally working on their peanut butter problems?

Yahoo has announced several enhancements to their continued open strategy. Some of the updates revolve around Yahoo products including Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, the Yahoo Toolbar and Yahoo Updates.

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.

A much discussed blog posting this morning comes from Saul Hansell at the New York Times, who spoke to both Google and Yahoo about their plans to turn their email products into social networks, in a manner of speaking: “Inbox 2.0.” The plans discussed in the post suggest some clever and creative thinking about how both companies can leverage their existing products and integrate them with other properties. But people at both companies also seem to be in a kind of frenzy, which may turn out to be unjustified in the long run, over how to compete with Facebook.

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.

There’s a flurry of activity in the newly invigorated personalized homepage category. Within the past two weeks all the major competitors have made announcements. First, AOL launched MyNetscape, followed by the release of “universal video widgets” on Pageflakes. Then the new MyYahoo launched. Yesterday Netvibes unveiled “Coriander,” its next product release with new content modules. And tonight Google went public with “themes” (skins) for its personalized homepage (GPH).

The designs are not yet live on the site so I’m unable to link to them (here’s a screen capture from CNET).

Google is initially offering six different themes that allow users to further customize GPH. These themes occupy the top of the page — the area containing the Google search box. The content headings take on a color consistent with the theme but the majority of the page remains white.

The themes are also dynamic and change according to local weather and time of day.

The graphics seek to bring warmth and personality to GPH. The new themes, which will likely grow in number over time, do accomplish that goal in my opinion. The other competitors, including MyYahoo, seem a bit more aesthetically dry by comparison.

Interestingly Google told me that GPH was the company’s fastest growing product in 2006.

Read/WriteWeb has a good overview of the just yesterday relaunched (ahead of schedule) new, more ajaxified MyYahoo. There are a number of improvements and upgrades:

* Pre-built personalized pages * Category pages for topics and “content suggestions” * Further customization of their page with drag-and-drop modules * Feed previews and a full post reader on the page * Editable Personal Assistant with instant access to things like Yahoo! Mail, horoscopes, local traffic, etc * Redesigned modules from Yahoo! and partners, with games, music, commerce, sports updates, weather, finance portfolios, TV listings, etc. * Sharing feature, enabling users to send their My Yahoo! page or favorite modules with friends and family * More “new interactive modules” to come

This long-overdue update comes amid increasing competition from GoogleIG, Netvibes, Pageflakes, the recently launched MyNetscape and others (e.g., Webwag).

One of the nice features of the new My Yahoo is what might be called a “floating” RSS reader that has a large preview pane and allows for easy paging through articles/posts.

I have long believed that My Yahoo is a strategic asset that the mothership has allowed to languish. Unlike any other site (save Google), it has the capacity to truly mainstream newsreaders/RSS. And this upgrade should prevent some defections to competitors that might have happened had Yahoo failed to make these changes.

But the real opportunity is not simply to hold ground and prevent “defections” but to truly mainstream RSS and personalization. My Yahoo has a self-reported 50 million users, but there hasn’t been much active customization. Netvibes has 10 million users according to the company. But those are admittedly “early adopters.” And Pageflakes CEO Dan Cohen and I recently discussed what it might take to mainstream personal start pages.

To that end, the new “packaged pages” on My Yahoo go some distance in this direction by making it easy (like sharing) for people to customize and add content without too much effort.

Several posts have pointed out similarities between the Yahoo homepage design and MyYahoo and speculated about whether similar customization is coming to the Yahoo homepage. One interesting feature of the new MyYahoo is its “pre-customization” based on registration data and, to some degree, user behavior. Accordingly, there are “content suggestions” for users. (Widgets are coming.)

One view of this newly competitive “personal dashboard” segment is that these sites are the new portals and will eventually replace “static” portal sites. That remains to be seen as does whether these sites can break through a devoted “early adopter” segment and become a mainstream phenomenon.

Here’s my previous post about Netvibes and how these personalized homepages could replace some usage of search.

PC World reports that My Yahoo will be launching an updated version within a few weeks. The reports do not specify exactly what we will see from the upgrade, but I am suspecting we may just see an enhanced RSS reader built into the portal.

Postscript from Greg: Dan Cohen, who previously ran MyYahoo (and before it worked on Google IG) is now CEO of MyYahoo competitor Pageflakes, which just launched a “universal video” widget today.

Here’s our previous post on another competitor in the segment, Netvibes, and the personalized homepage/dashboard concept more generally.

MyYahoo is the dominant property in the “space” (with 50 million users) but Netvibes now claims 10 million. Pageflakes’ Cohen wants to mainstream the site with a combination of social/viral elements and ease-of-use.

Yahoo can reclaim leadership if the MyYahoo update is good, but it may have lost some ground by failing to sufficiently pay attention to this asset.