In a promising move, Yahoo will add social features to its mail service and increase the “sociability” of many of its services.

In addition, you will now be able to turn the electronic mail service into a “scrapbook for your life” and to compete with other social networking services more effectively; outside programmers will now have access to the platform.

This is a smart move but not for the reason you may think. Social networks in general are not great ad revenue drivers. But coupled with the in-depth analytics Yahoo possesses, a social media network could have much more value than for the FaceBooks of the world. Let’s see what they do with these new features and whether customers like them.

Then we can worry about the advertisers.