[GigaOM] — The web giant Yahoo is planning to turn its email offering, which is serving over 200 million users at the moment, into into a platform for applications, much in the same way Facebook does.

The program will be launched in beta fairly soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the mail client. Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.

The plan was revealed in an interview by the New York Times with a Yahoo’s senior executive, Brad Garlinghouse, who was at the time running Yahoo’s communications business, in November last year, dubbing it “Inbox 2.0.“

“There will be some sort of profile system attached to Inbox 2.0,” said Brad Garlinghouse in the interview. “The profile page is where you can expose what you want people to know about you,” he added.

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