Inbox 2.0: Yahoo and Google to Turn E-Mail Into a Social Network. Ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360. Google and Yahoo have come up with new and very similar plans to respond to the challenge from MySpace and Facebook: They hope to turn their e-mail systems and personalized home page services (iGoogle and MyYahoo) into social networks. Web-based e-mail systems already contain much of what Facebook calls the social graph — the connections between people. That’s why the social networks offer to import the e-mail address books of new users to jump-start their list of friends. Yahoo and Google realize that they have this information and can use it to build their own services that connect people to their contacts. I don’t have a lot of detail from Google, but I’ve heard from several executives that this is their plan.
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.” Brad Garlinghouse (Photo: Neal Hamberg/Bloomberg News) New Gmail Features. Use Gmail to Convert Word Docs to HTML.