I reported earlier today that Yahoo Mail was going to release an API tomorrow. Ryan Kennedy just confirmed in a comment on that post, that it launched it late tonight. The announcement can be found here.

While we are certainly proud of the success of Yahoo! Mail, today we are announcing how we are going beyond the boundaries of the Yahoo! network and enabling developers to build new tools or applications around Yahoo! Mail. We are thrilled to announce the open availability of the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, web service for Yahoo! Mail (accessible via SOAP or JSON-RPC) that we previewed to Yahoo! Hack Day attendees. With the Yahoo! Mail Web Service, you can connect to the core mail platform to perform typical mailbox tasks for premium users such as list messages and folders, and compose and send messages (you can also build mail preview tools for free users with limited Web Service functionality). In other words, developers outside of Yahoo! can now build mail tools or applications on the same infrastructure we use to build the highly-scaled Yahoo! Mail service that serves nearly 250 million Yahoo! Mail users today

Yahoo is also offering commissions to developers who build applications targeted at their premium email users. They’ll give you $10 for every new Yahoo Mail plus account that gets referred to them from your application. I like this step, it will produce some creative results, and probably quickly.

Here is a short screencast with Ryan Kennedy as he explains more about the API:

Here is Lee Culver at Yahoo Hack Day demonstrating her Flickr Postcard hack which is using Yahoo Mail Web Services:

Once again, this is a big step forward by Yahoo, and it will certainly be interesting to see how Gmail will respond, if they will at all. Yahoo Mail makes its revenue from premium account holders, while Google makes it through targeted ads around your email.Couple this with the recent announcement from Yahoo that they are giving away unlimited space, they are looking to remain on the top of the email world, and it will be hard for their competitors to catch up anytime soon.

Today is apparently Yahoo Mail day here on my blog.

Chad Dickerson from Yahoo Developers’ Network announced today at the ETech conference that Yahoo will be releasing a Yahoo Mail API, kinda.

He didn’t exactly say that, but people I’ve talked to have said this is true and it should be out either tomorrow or in the next few days, Om Malik is hearing the same thing.

What could you do with a Yahoo Mail API? Well for one thing, if I used Yahoo Mail, I would build my own mail application because the new Yahoo Mail reminds me too much of a nicer version of Outlook Web Access. And I hate Outlook, and I hate Outlook Web Access even more.  The only reason I use it is to sync my Windows Mobile phone to my exchange server so that I can get push email and my calendar syncs with my desktop so I can make changes out of the office.

These latest moves on Yahoo’s behalf are in a good direction. They’re aiming at keeping Yahoo on top of the next-generation email applications chart, and are trying to bring some innovation to their products through the release of an API.

What would/will you do with a Yahoo Mail API?

Yahoo just announced that it was upping it’s email capacity for users to unlimited. That means that you never will have to delete an email message of any size ever again. Competitor’s Google (Gmail) currently is giving away 2.83GB and Microsoft (Live Hotmail) gives away 2GB.

There is some talk around the blogosphere that Gmail may follow suit, but I don’t think they can. Many people use Gmail to store files, backups and other things. Many also use it as a 2nd drive with GMail Drive shell extension. I don’t know of any similar use on Yahoo mail as of now, but I can definitely see it on the horizon now that they’re giving away all the storage you can eat.

So if Google were to give away unlimited email storage they would be an influx of files uploaded that would, in my opinion, triple the total storage used on Gmail’s system overnight. I currently use Gmail, and have since it was released years ago, and I’m very satisfied with the capacity of my account.

For email purposes I see no reason for unlimited storage at this point. Since getting my first email on Gmail in 2004, and NEVER deleting an email, I’ve only used up 794 MB (28%) of my 2.833 GB limit.

The day will come when I reach my Gmail limit, and I think Google should give out more space on a user to user basis. When I get to the limit they should automatically adjust my account to give me more space, that is if their system detects and decides that I’m not using Gmail as a secondary hard drive.

Sevenload, the German based media sharing startup I talked about yesterday, has decided to take down it’s special on Guantanamo Bay, the US detention facility housing Al-Qaeda and Taliban regime members.

My post here explains why I wouldn’t be using the site in the future. I still might not, but I’m glad they decided to take it down.

Their official line, as stated in a comment on the post, is that “this [Guantanamo Bay] discussion has now passed it’s prime”, but it’s clear that they got my message, I just wish they would be a little more upfront about it in the comment.

As you can see from that screen shot of where the Guantanamo Bay section was located, it says it was shutdown due to complaints.

I applaud them for taking this step, I still probably won’t be using their service in the near future, but if you find it of interest to you then I say you should go ahead and try it out.

As many of you may, or may not know, Kathy Sierra has been threatened to a point which could scare anyone. I don’t think there is room for this type of stuff anywhere. It’s sick that anyone would do this.

But the steps Kathy and Robert Scoble are taking now may just fuel the fire, and make these types of threats more common in the future. You see, Kathy posted a long entry on her blog about the threats and how she is scared to leave the house and Scoble is taking the week off from blogging “in support of Kathy”.

Now this almost amounts to giving into demands of terrorists, you simply embolden them and their agenda. Now these anonymous people who posted these threats are now going to be embolden by the power you just gave them. I can hear it now, them saying “we made the blogosphere go down on its knees for a week”.

My advice is to ignore it for the most part, and if it gets to a point to where it actually scares you, then call the police. Don’t stop doing what yo do though.