As sneak-peaked by Jerry Yang and David Filo at CES yesterday, fun things seem to be happening at Yahoo!. Dan Farber writes about their keynote address on his 'Beyond the Lines' blog at ZDNet:

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang made his inaugural CES appearance, outlining how he plans to evolve his company ahead of the curve and to become an indispensable starting point for consumers’ Web experience, which has become richer and more complex over the last decade. “We call this Life with an exclamation point,” Yang said. “At Yahoo we want to be most essential starting point for your life,” and “take the complexity of the Web and simplify your life through very powerful technologies.”

Basically, Yahoo! is integrating craploads of stuff -- including third party applications -- into Yahoo! Mail and making that the hub for what you do on the Internet.

To me, that's a brilliant idea. Yahoo! Mail is, by far, my favourite webmail service (I've been using it since 1999), and though I now POP my mail from there (some years ago I upgraded to the paid Yahoo! Mail Plus), when I'm not sitting at my laptop, Yahoo! Mail is generally the centre and the starting point of my web browsing experience [1]. In fact, when I'm not on my laptop (e.g. I'm at work) I POP all my other e-mail accounts into Yahoo! because I like it so much. (Can you tell I'm excited by these new developments?)

I'm also a fan of Yahoo! itself. Yahoo! was the first website I visited on the web (back in '96) and I've been using it regularly ever since. I also do most of my online shopping through Yahoo!. Okay, I should stop now. I'm sounding like a Yahoo! fanboy. Still, this is good news and I await further developments.

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[1] For completeness' sake, my non-laptop web experience revolves primarily around Yahoo! Mail, Google, my own Page o' Links, and these days, Facebook.