Yahoo! has made mobilization of its Web-based services a key strategy this year.

For Internet brand leader Yahoo!, 2007 is the year of its mobile Web services, including Yahoo! Go for Mobile, its mobile search engine oneSearch, and mobile advertising. There’s some evidence the emphasis is working, as Yahoo! has become the leading mobile Internet brand.

The research firm M:Metrics says Google is the top mobile Web domain for cell phone browsers, but Yahoo’s brand has a broader reach because of its variety of access methods, including browsing, SMS, search, e-mail and instant messaging. Yahoo’s brand reaches 7% of mobile subscribers, totaling nearly 15 million users, while Google reaches 4.8% or 10.2 million users. Yahoo’s mobile e-mail leads that category with more than 8 million users, the analyst firm says. Yahoo’s mail is accessible on phones through a variety of ways, including its Yahoo! Go service that was released in beta last January and became generally available in the United States this summer.

Another research firm, Telephia, says Yahoo’s mobile services were used by 7% of mobile subscribers, compared to 4% for Microsoft and 3% for Google and America Online. Those numbers were measured before Yahoo! Go was launched, however.

Yahoo! Go is kind of a mobile browser that links to customized content, including e-mail, oneSearch, the Flickr photo-sharing site, news, weather and sports. The company hopes it will draw many of the 500 million people who use their PCs to use Yahoo! services. Reviewers have given Go high marks for its integration and ease of use.

Joe Hayashi, a product management director in Yahoo’s Connected Life unit, says Go is available on more than 200 phone models now and will hit 400 by the end of the year. It also will be pre-loaded on devices from Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, LG, RIM BlackBerry and HTC.

Hayashi: More than 80 oneSearch partners globally.

Yahoo! has also integrated advertising into its oneSearch service, including opening up the platform to content publishers. Yahoo! Mobile Publisher includes a number of services designed to make it easier for consumers to discover and buy mobile content, Hayashi says. The initial advertising partners were MobiTV, Opera and go2.

Yahoo! designed oneSearch specifically for mobile phones, he says, providing relevant information to a query rather than links to other Web sites. That includes location-based content according to user preferences. oneSearch is available in 14 countries, with several more on the way.

Hayashi says Yahoo! and its oneSearch is the preferred search partner for more than 80 carriers and device manufacturers globally..

Yahoo! mobile mail includes the ability to open attachments, including Microsoft Word and Excel documents, PDF files and images. The documents are converted on Yahoo’s servers to the appropriate screen size so that more phones can open them.

The latest mail upgrade also integrates the online Yahoo! address book and calendars.

Hayashi says Yahoo! also works with the manufacturers of high-end phones like the BlackBerry and Apple iPhone to integrate mail. Yahoo! was the first Internet e-mail provider that offered 2-way synchronized e-mail, he says, which means that mail deleted on the phone also is deleted online. The company’s Web mail also is synchronized on iPhone, including push e-mail.

USER PROFILE
Who’s using mail on Yahoo! Go? Hayashi says there are three main types of users: the social user who organizes things, the prosumer who is productivity oriented, and people who like to share content, such as photos.

“It’s natural to share things with mobile e-mail,” he says. “MMS has not been successful (as a way to share content) and people are more comfortable with e-mail.”

Yahoo’s Web-based e-mail uses advertising, and advertising is used in relation to oneSearch results and other Yahoo! Go services. But there are no ads on mobile e-mail, at least yet. Hayashi says ad-supported mobile e-mail is something the company is studying, but that it isn’t a priority because Yahoo! wants to make sure it works well for its users.

“We’re experimenting with a variety of things,” he says, but adds that mobile e-mail supported advertising “is not a major thing” at this point.

Yahoo’s interest in getting its services onto phones illustrates how important the Internet community generally sees mobile access. Apple’s iPhone is another illustration, as is Google’s mobile versions of its instant messaging, e-mail, maps and search services. Google’s services aren’t tied together like Yahoo! Go, however.

Yahoo! and the other e-mail providers know that although mobile e-mail has been around for years, especially in the enterprise with BlackBerry, there still is plenty of room to grow. Gartner recently predicted that 350 million people will use wireless e-mail globally by 2010, which would mean that 20% of all e-mail accounts would be mobilized.

“Over the next three years, wireless e-mail will become increasingly popular with both businesses and consumers,” says Monica Basso, research vice president at Gartner.  She predicts improved usability of mobile e-mail and more support from both device manufacturers and operators. “By 2012, wireless e-mail products will be fully interoperable, commoditized and have standard features.  They will be shipping in larger volumes at greatly reduced prices.”

Basso also says wireless e-mail will be completely integrated with other messaging services by 2017, so there will be true unified communications.