14 DAY TRIAL // Yahoo isn't exactly thriving these days but, just because it doesn't get as much attention as Facebook or Twitter or even Google for that matter, it doesn't mean that it's going anywhere. In fact, Yahoo is still one of the biggest online companies and its services are used by a large percentage of Internet users. And, just in case we needed reassurance, Yahoo has provided some stats to show just how well it's doing.
Yahoo's senior vice president for applications, Bryan Lamkin, especially underlines the success of the new “status-casting” feature launched a while back. The feature allows Yahoo users to update their global status from a variety of services and products like Yahoo Messenger, Mail and for a few months even from the Yahoo homepage. The status is viewable on the users' Yahoo Profile but also in Mail and Messenger. The feature seems to have been a great success as there are now 800 million status messages coming every month from the users.
Other services are also boasting some impressive stats. Yahoo Mail, the world's most popular webmail service, is now moving 100 billion email messages every month, a huge number considering that the world's Internet population is at about 1.5 billion. Yahoo Mail has about 100 million users in the US alone, double that of its closest competitor, Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail.
Yahoo has some nice numbers when it comes to photos too. Yahoo-owned Flickr now hosts 4 billion photos of which 130 million have geotagging data. Users also add 100 million more every month. Another interesting tidbit was the claim that Yahoo Mail moves more photos in one week than are uploaded to Facebook in an entire month.
But despite all of the nice numbers, Yahoo can't really compete with Facebook, try as it may, on several accounts. The social network now hosts 20 billion images, which makes it by far the biggest photo host in the world, and it severs 600,000 of them every second. The biggest difference though is that Facebook's photos and status updates are a lot more open, sometimes entirely public, than the ones on Yahoo Mail for example.