• The New York Times , Wednesday, November 14, 2007 11 AM

Both Google and Yahoo aim to turn their email services into social networks. Both plan to introduce social features that keep people using their applications for longer. The idea is to turn iGoogle and MyYahoo into a more central hub that serves the triple purpose of being a personalized home page, an email inbox and a social networking profile.

So you can ignore Orkut, OpenSocial, Yahoo Mash and Yahoo 360-baby steps in a broader plan-although these will one day be integrated with the new socialized home pages. Google was shorter on details about its plan, but Joe Kraus, the executive who runs the OpenSocial alliance, admits there are opportunities with iGoogle, which syncs with Gmail and Google Talk.

Yahoo, on the other hand, is calls its social home page drive "Inbox 2.0." Yahoo Mail will add features like more prominently displaying messages from those whom you communicate with more. It also plans to add personal profile pages, links to other profile pages (not necessarily Yahoo-based), a news feed-like feature called "vitality," birthday lists, etc. Inbox 2.0 will compile data from all Yahoo services-from Yahoo Music to Yahoo Shopping-to create user profiles.

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