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Yahoo recently announced it is adding a number of third-party applications and widgets to some of its main properties, including Yahoo Mail and My Yahoo that will allow users to, among other things, send a PayPal payment or publish a blog post without leaving Yahoo’s website.

“We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can ease the pain of site-hopping to help you do more things at once,” Yahoo senior vice president Tapan Bhat wrote in a post on Yahoo’s official blog. According to the Web company, the average person in the United States visits 85 sites a month. “That just sounds exhausting. So we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we can ease the pain of site-hopping to help you do more things at once,” he wrote.

Yahoo will add a total of 20 third-party widgets to its Web properties so that people will have fewer reasons to leave its properties to do something on the Web. Yahoo Mail in the U.S. will feature a PayPal widget for sending and receiving money, Picnik to perform photo editing directly from the inbox, MyPhotos to organize and share photos, and ZumoDrive to share large files.

As for My Yahoo, the upcoming widgets will include WordPress, Mint.com for financial management, and “What’s Cookin” for recipes and meal ideas, all of which will be available from the My Yahoo content gallery. Finally, Yahoo said it is also planning to add widgets to its Yahoo Connected TV service and to Zimbra, its email and collaboration tool.

This move is part of Yahoo’s Open Strategy, which was designed to let outside developers offer access to their services to the vast Yahoo user base. Similarly to Google and Facebook, Yahoo is therefore posing itself as a development platform that can promote third-party services while providing its users a better experience.

Yahoo’s Open Strategy was first announced in April 2008, but was not live until last December, when the company unveiled a first set of applications for Yahoo Mail and the MyYahoo start page. As Yahoo announced in December, the company want to make these technologies more open to external developers and integrate social networking features into the site.

Yahoo still has a lot of catching up to do with Google’s iGoogle or the popular Facebook, which counts over 52,000 applications currently available in its directory, but the company still has the potential to build a big ecosystem that could contribute to renovating developers’ interest into writing applications for Yahoo.

The company said it is making its applications available to a limited number of users during a beta testing period, and that it will release them to the general public in a few months once the beta period is over.