Read about SlingCatcher and much more from CES at last100.

Dan Farber has a great write-up of Yang's speech on ZDNet, so in this post I'll summarize that and give some analysis on Yahoo's future.

Dan Farber reported:

"Yahoo Mail (communication services) serves as the hub, but the interface also includes third-party applications and social context. Connections are contacts, and based on frequency and volume of communications email is reordered on the strength of the connections. The page also includes updates from connections, showing what is relevant rather than just relatively static inbox."

Interesting to note here that Google is also looking to use Web email as a hub for social networking. So both Yahoo! and Google are really targeting email to get users attention and integrate social web products.

Image: Dan Farber, ZDNet

Zimbra Integration

Yahoo! will include Zimbra in the Life! strategy. Zimbra is an open source mail and messaging platform, which became famous in the web 2.0 world for its mashups ability. It was acquired last year by Yahoo; and so it's exciting to know that Zimbra will be utilized more fully in Yahoo's product range.

Yahoo Go 3.0 - Widgets Galore

Finally, Yang showed off the new version of its Yahoo Go mobile platform. Labeled Yahoo Go 3.0, it will introduce widgets for things like email and Flickr, enabling those Y! products to be better utilized on mobile phones. Go will also become an open platform for third party widget developers - see our coverage of this last night. As Marshall wrote, unlike Google's Android OS, the Yahoo! Go platform will work on more than 250 mobile devices that Go already works on.

Yahoo has partnered with the likes of eBay, Viacom and News Corp on widgets for Go. Yahoo is also working with LG Electronics and other phone vendors to make widgets run natively on phones.

From the user side, a new widgets gallery called MySnippets will give users feeds and services that can be embedded in Yahoo pages. A beta version of 3.0 will be available later today by directing your phone’s browser to http://beta.m.yahoo.com

Conclusion

It looks like Yahoo is finally beginning to tie together its many 'best of breed' web 2.0 products (Flickr, Zimbra, Mail, Go) into an integrated product offering. Mobile has been an area of development at Yahoo for some time - they appear to be doing more work than Google and Microsoft in the mobile portal / social networking arena, and with Go 3.0 it might crack the mainstream in a big way. Yahoo has also been a leader in terms of open standards - see our coverage of Ian Rogers about the Media Web for one example.

Time will tell whether these moves by Yahoo will get them out of the funk they fell into during 2007, but Yang's speech at CES had many encouraging signs.

The service, however, is not usable yet. Try logging in to an OpenID enabled site using your Flickr URL and you'll get this message: "Hey there! You have stopped by a bit sooner than we had expected. This feature is still being tested, so please check back in a few days. " So Flickr is set to become one more of a long list of accounts you can use to login to a relative handful of websites.

Yahoo! probably has more adherents than G*d, so meaningful OpenID support company wide would blow the doors wide open. That's not likely to be what happens.

Update: See also https://me.yahoo.com/ - all the more reason to be optimistic. I never give people enough credit when writing posts like this!

Is this all there is?

When big vendors offer to authenticate your identity to the mostly tiny sites around the web that accept outside OpenID credentials, it's hard to get excited about that anymore. I've got an OpenID account and would like to use it to login to Yahoo! services.

To be fair, I said it was a let down when Google recently enabled OpenID login to the commenting on their beta version of Blogger and it was only a week or two until all of Blogger allowed OpenID from any other provider. That's still a small start but it is something and it's a major vendor acting as a relying party instead of just an authenticating party. That's where the big turn in the road is.

I sure hope Yahoo! is going to announce more than slow experimentation with being an authenticating party at CES. Remember AOL's big OpenID announcement? It's good for nothing but PR - they haven't done anything with it, haven't educated their users about it, nothing. It's good PR for OpenID advocates too, but otherwise it's a let down.

These major vendors also don't seem to do much beyond simple authentication. Check out our coverage of SpreadOpenID for a discussion about what kinds of awesomeness are possible. Let's see some awesomeness around OpenID at CES, can we Yahoo!?

Maybe I'm being an unappreciative jerk though. Maybe this is plenty of cause for OpenID supporters to celebrate.