Better Y! Mail Beta - Less ads, More mail (Oct-2010)

Yahoo! just released a new beta of their Mail web application. Overall, it looks a bit more modern and promises much faster performance (I have not seen any improvement yet...in fact sometimes it is slower than before).

However, it needed a bit of spit and polish. I decided to write a user script (works on chrome and firefox with greasemonkey or scriptish) that tightens up the wasted space in the header and removes the main ads that take up space on the mail home page as well as in the inbox.

Available for Firefox* & Google Chrome
Download the user script directly or from the Userscripts.org script page

* Firefox (You need Greasemonkey or Scriptish already installed)
 
Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage Before:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage After:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Inbox Before:

Yahoo Mail Beta Oct 2010 Homepage After:

More mail for YOU

Available for Firefox* & Google Chrome
Download the user script directly or from the Userscripts.org script page

* Firefox (You need Greasemonkey or Scriptish already installed)

Microsoft & Yahoo! Search Partnership already happening?

I do not know if this is anything new, but today I was telling a friend about bing and that he should try it out because it is starting to drive traffic to our sites.

To our surprise, he tried some searches and we started seeing our own ads appearing in the results. Looking at the ads and links of the ads, we saw that they were from our Yahoo! CPC accounts.

Here is a screenshot today. It is not our ad in this case, but look at the URL in the status bar. It is pointing to Overture (Yahoo!).

Am I missing something, or has the Yahoo! / Microsoft partnership already started (perhaps in silent beta mode).

I am going to try Bing as my default search provider for a little while to see how well (or not) it works.