Faster Forward: Yahoo redesigns its Web mail

At midnight, Yahoo introduced a redesigned version of its Web-mail site, Yahoo Mail. And then a funny thing happened: Nothing. No Twitter chatter, no Facebook comments by friends, no late-night posts on the usual tech blogs.

The Internet can be so cruel sometimes.

But it can also be perceptive: Yahoo's relaunched Web mail--available at features.mail.yahoo.com--probably won't have veterans of its older interface feeling terribly lost.

Posts on its corporate and e-mail blogs point to such changes as faster performance, integrated social networking, photo slideshows and video playback.

But if you ask a randomly-chosen Yahoo Mail user what's new about the site, you're more likely to hear "it's purple"--the new design echoes the eggplant hue of mobile versions of Yahoo's service.