Yahoo  announced that they are working on a new look for their email service, but that’s not all. They also tackled their email service’s performance and “rebuilt from the ground up” which when I checked just now, is two times faster than it was.

Yahoo also added some new features including status updates sharing with Twitter and Facebook, and watching videos and photos without leaving Yahoo Mail.This is the second major update they did during the period of CEO Carol Bartz. About a year ago, the company introduced a less clustered interface for Yahoo Mail with fewer ads and several social capabilities.

Yahoo is still ahead of the competition with Hotmail but the company is experiencing a decline. CEO Bartz sees a “pretty old product” and consumer behavior shift for this deterioration, as reported. People are patronizing social networks for short messages.

With a string of updates to its major portals, Yahoo’s been restructuring the way most of its social interactions take place.  Earlier this month Yahoo Connect was released, in an effort to recoup some of that social activity leaving its portals for other areas of the web.  This is just another way in which a major site from days gone by is looking to remain relevant amidst major changes in communicative behavior.

As Yahoo loses its influence in the search sector, maintaining its portals will be an important way for the company to contribute to the future of search initiatives.  Microsoft now powers all of Yahoo search in the US and Canada.