Yahoo announced today that users of Yahoo Mail, My Yahoo, Yahoo Connected TV and Zimbra email will find a number of new third-party apps and widgets that will give them quicker access to things they do online everyday.

To put this in perspective, Yahoo says that in the US, an average of 85 sites are visited per person, per month. The idea is that if you use these apps and widgets on Yahoo sites, you won’t have to go to all of those other sites. The company offers the following slideshow:

Gmail will now let you import email and contacts from other email providers like Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL (and a bunch more. Full list at the bottom of the article). This means that if you have an old account that you’d like to merge into your Gmail account, you can do so.

It also means (and this is what Google is pushing for) that users of other services can easily start new Gmail accounts without abandoning everything they have built up with another provider. Google is making the switch more enticing.

Social sites may be surpassing email in usage, but some fairly surprising data from Hitwise shows that visits to Gmail have surpassed visits to YouTube. The news comes at a time when Gmail can use some good news as complaints about downtime have recently mounted.

Even if Yahoo has fallen far behind Google in the search game, let’s admit that the runner-up tries; updates and fresh features launch on a monthly (or weekly) basis.  But new stats show that Yahoo Mail continues to be the company’s real bread and butter in terms of traffic.

Google has announced four changes to Gmail’s contact manager. Each change is a feature to enhance the service’s usability.

Gmail is growing rapidly. Yahoo has long dominated the race against Microsoft’s Hotmail and Google’s Gmail, but Gmail is on pace to overthrow the other two. I got in touch with Yahoo Mail’s VP John Kremer to try and find out some expectations Yahoo has for Yahoo Mail.

Yahoo announced that it now offers an SMS chat feature in its classic version of Yahoo Mail, something Gmail has been offering for several months, and Yahoo has been doing in its newer version since 2007.

Google has offered SMS in its chat since October, and Chat in general for quite some time. They have also launched voice and video chat recently.

AOL has introduced new features to its Web Mail that allows users one-click access to Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other third-party sites directly from its mail page.

The new version is available globally in 38 countries around the world and is the company’s latest effort to make it more open to third-party content while offering more opportunities to advertisers.

"Web Mail is an integral part of the AOL experience and at the heart of our product offerings," said Ted Cahall, President, AOL Products and Technologies.

Yahoo is taking new measures to increase it’s ability to prevent spam from reaching your Yahoo Mail inbox, and from legitimate messages from reaching your spam folder.

The Gmail Team has been very busy, as they have released yet another new feature in Labs. This time they have launched the ability to turn emails into Google Docs documents.

I’ll admit it. I’ve put off purposefully joining Open ID for no real reason. But now, whether we want to or not, you and I (well, I’m guessing you are, anyway) are being jumped in to the world of Open ID. Because not only are Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Mail (aka Hotmail) joining the Open ID ranks, allowing their logins to become Open ID logins, but so is Gmail.