Yahoo! has started a new beta project for its web mail service. The project involves a new, more user-friendly inbox and is bundled with several features to help users to better cope with adding and sharing content between their email accounts, the 3rd party applications and services.

One of the major changes is the new Welcome page that focuses on social activity and news, rather than typical content and advertisements. Another interesting feature is the “My Connections” tab, an area where you can see recent activity of contacts with whom you communicate the most. The new tab also allows users to add other contacts, too. Similarly with the Yahoo Mail Beta, every mail is opened in a different tab, thus making it easy to switch between many messages.

Still, the major benefit of this new service is the integration of Yahoo! Mail with different applications and services proprietary to Yahoo!. “Updates from My Connections” is a new tab on the right side of the screen which displays recent activity of the user’s favorite contacts. This means that you are always a click away from seeing what your friends’ favorite TV shows are, how did they enjoy their staying at the hotel they had been checked in, by recording their activity on Yahoo! Buzz, Yahoo! Travel or Yahoo! TV.

Yahoo! is going to implement some other of its proprietary web services in the near future, among which there will also be Flickr. The company has also announced that their service will also be opened to 3rd party applications and websites once they will issue a full release of the new Yahoo! Mail.