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[yodel.yahoo.com...]
Late on Wednesday, Yahoo plans to deliver application programming interfaces (APIs) for Yahoo Mail, said Chad Dickerson, head of the Yahoo Developer Network. The move comes on the heels of an announcement to offer unlimited storage capacity for Yahoo Mail users starting from May.Yahoo officials had indicated in September of last year their intention to let external developers write applications for Yahoo Mail, and the tools will now be available at the Yahoo Developer Network Web site.
Yahoo provides similar development tools for other of its services, like the photo sharing site Flickr, the Yahoo search engine, and the Yahoo Shopping product comparison site.
But in Yahoo!'s case I believe it's a simple numbers game. For every user wanting to "game" the system by storing tens, hundreds or thousands of GB of files, there are going to be tens of thousands of "normal" users for whom the announcement is essentially meaningless since they're not anywhere near the existing quotas yet.
After all, Yahoo! Mail has somewhere in the order of 100 million users (though not necessarily all active, of course) so a few heavy users are an insignificant rounding error compared to their overall storage requirements.
I mean you don't question your local diner's "bottomless cup of cofee" do you? Naw, you tell all your friends how awesome the place is despite how dirty it is because you can hang out there all night.
how is it possible for them to offer "unlimited" space?
I don't think they are claiming an infinite amount of storage space exists.
I think they are telling me (and you) they will not place any limits on the amount of space we use.
It's like a retail store offering refunds for 30 days after a purchase. We all know they couldn't stay in business if everyone returned everything they bought. But everyone doesn't return everything they buy. Some people almost never return anything.
It's the same concept.
FarmBoy
The best news is the JSON interface to yahoo mail, that should be amazing to see what comes of that!
fantastic news! perhaps i could write a POP3 wrapper with the new API for those who wished they could pop email.
Imagine the massive server farm that yahoo mail works on with 5000 machines. Each machine has a 200gig hd in it. That is 500,000 gigs of data (5 exabytes?).
With a 10meg ethernet connection to each box, how long would it take to fill 5 exabytes? You would also consider broadband internet and network latency restrictions. eg: you could not fill such a volume in your lifetime. By the time you did in 50 years or so - yahoo will have another 5000 data centers and the average hard drive will be 5 yottabytes.
It is interesting that today I found rediffmail providing unlimited space.
I guess these gues are inspired by gmail.
But how do they provide unlimited? :)
Google (GOOG ) chief executive officer Eric E. Schmidt announced today that Google will henceforth use Yahoo Mail for data storage of all Google operations. "Unlimited free data storage was simply too good an offer for us to pass up," Schmidt commented. "This also gives us an opportunity to forge another partnership with one of our chief competitors." Technical details are expected to be released in several days.
second this make no sense!
Who is that fool to store all his pc data ijn yahoo mail=?!
this make no sense!
testing0 - My post was joking... but Yahoo's Yodel article does indeed use the word "unlimited" with regard to email storage. I guess they're figuring you can only hit the send button so many times a year. ;)
