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CEO Jerry Yang told the CES 2008 crowds about Yahoo's plans to make its Mail client a social tool with all the widgets one could want.

Web browser? So 1994. How about a mail client that knows your social networks and will give the most important messages and people priority in the inbox?

Yahoo's latest announcement from the big Las Vegas show noted the potential for Yahoo Mail to be what we remember Microsoft fearing from Netscape: a tool that doesn't care about the underlying operating system.

Why have all kinds of applications and browser windows open when Yahoo Mail can do it all? That will mean opening Mail to third party developers, and the other big Yahoo told the CES audience this is close to reality:

"Yahoo! has today outlined what is possible and that the future is not that far away," said David Filo, co-founder and Chief Yahoo!. "Yahoo! is uniquely positioned to make this all a reality - we have scale, a huge community of users, great applications and APIs and insightful data. We now have an open platform for third party developers to build some interesting applications."

Yang suggested Yahoo Mail could tap the Facebooks and MySpaces of the world in a way to make the email client more "personally relevant" to its users. Important people, apparently, would not have their messages languishing in the inbox, awaiting attention, because Yahoo would bring them to the user's attention.

Also, Yang talked about the big push Yahoo has been making into the mobile world. We think Yahoo believes it can win the kind of share of usage on phones that Google enjoys with search and ads on PCs. Millions of mobile users worldwide makes that a goal worth achieving.