Yahoo is looking for more ways to keep you interacting with friends through email by adding new features to your email Inbox. Last month social networking features started popping up in users’ email, and this month Yahoo started adding casual games.

These new games might be familiar to Facebook and MySpace users, as they were created by some of the most popular social gaming companies. The only difference is that by tying the applications to your Inbox, the games can include your entire contacts list.

The four applications Yahoo is launching with are Mafia Wars, Flixster, Mytopia Online and My Emote. Below is an image from the application welcome screen that you can find at http://apps.yahoo.com/myapps.

Mafia Wars allows you by invite people to be part of your family. Your goal is to get people to join your crew and create the largest network of mobsters.

Flixster allows you to play mini-games with movie themes and keeps track of your score. You can also watch trailers, rate movies and check movie show times from the application.

Mytopia Online is a gamin community that lets you play all sorts of popular mini-games with friends in their Card Room, Club House and Casino. Then you can keep track of your scores and unlock new games.

My Emote is an emoticon-based mood status application. You can set your Emote on your Yahoo Profile based on your mood so that your friends can see.

If any of these games sound familiar, it’s likely because they were developed by the some of the most popular social gaming companies. In fact, some of them are simply adaptations of games from other social networks.

So what’s so great about having these games in your email Inbox instead of Facebook? With Yahoo’s model you can play the games with anyone in your address book.

If you’ve ever wanted to invite someone to a game and realized that they don’t have a Facebook account, this is the solution. Now you can play these games just by inviting your friends to join your network in your Yahoo Inbox.

It will be interesting to see what kind of new ideas developers can bring to the social gaming platforms. While some are fairly popular, applications on social networks are getting less limelight as their novelty wears off.

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Entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 9:05 am under Social Media, Yahoo!.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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