Yahoo Buzz has been available in the USA for a few months now, and the site will soon (July 28) be available in a UK edition. It's fairly close to Digg, but with the addition of algorithm-based ranking, as well as user-generated ranking, affecting which news stories reach the top of the charts.

The new Mail, which will arrive on users' desktops over the next few months, is a more interesting proposition, integrating closely with both Flickr (allowing users to attach pictures to messages directly from the Yahoo-owned sharing site) and an indexing service called Xoopit (which Yahoo today announced that it had acquired) that will show all the photos attached to messages in a user's inbox.

Dave McDowell, Yahoo's European head of mail, showed off the new Mail features in a presentation that included the interesting claim that Yahoo offered the fastest webmail service in the UK. We asked Mr McDowell what he meant by that, and he said that Yahoo had made arrangements with two independent companies to test various webmail services, but he wasn't able to tell us the names of the companies, and nor would he tell us the figures.

Apparently the other sites tested included big names such as Microsoft's Hotmail/Live Mail service, Google Mail and AOL. We're not convinced that such a test can accurately reflect the true state of webmail services, given that there are hundreds of other mail services available. Of course, we can't tell because Yahoo wouldn't tell us how they'd done the testing or what the results were.

Yahoo Mail will also include a status report, allowing users to add a line to their Mail profiles to tell friends and family what they're up to. Yes, it's pretty much exactly what Twitter and Facebook already do, and although it can integrate with both of those services, we're not sure whether users really need another way to tell people what they're doing (we'll revisit this statement in a year or two to see how wrong we've been).

Interestingly, the company says it will be opening the Mail API up so that other people and companies can build applications to integrate with Yahoo users' mail accounts.

That's something that appears to extend to the redesigned homepage, too - increasingly, big web and media companies are coming to the realisation that they need to work with, not against, their competitors, and so the new Yahoo site includes a bar full of icons for other sites, including eBay, BBC News, Facebook and Time Out London.

These sites are there because of commercial deals between their owners and Yahoo (the same applies to the three newspapers whose headlines now appear on the homepage) but it is possible to add your own - cleverly, the site will automatically locate an RSS feed for any site whose address you type in, which is a nice touch.

Dave McDowell also fielded a question about the company's neglected paid-for Mail Plus service, and whether it would continue, now that some of its features are being superseded by ones in the free version. He said: "Premium services are not a huge focus for us [now]. We're focused on building an audience. That said, there are features in Yahoo Mail Plus that are appealing to some users and we have no plans to cease offering [it]."