Its been a big week for the brass over at Yahoo!. On Monday they announced that they would begin accepting applications from sites wishing to be listed in their mobile search engine, OneSearch. Today, (Wednesday) in celebration of the company’s 10th anniversary of it’s email service Yahoo! made history with the announcement that their free e-mail service will begin providing unlimited storage space to its all of its nearly 250 million users worldwide.

The announcement instantly pushes Yahoo! to the head of the free email class putting distance between its two largest competitors, Microsoft Corp’s Hotmail and Google Inc’s G-Mail, which currently provide 2 gigabytes and 2.8 gigabytes of free storage, respectively. Prior to the unprecedented announcement, Yahoo! users were constrained to only 1 gigabyte of storage space. The storage space expansion is set to begin in May and will take several months before all users will be able to take advantage of the new feature.

This is big news. Ok AOL now provides unlimited storage but AOL is by no means as powerful or as expansive as Yahoo or the big three email providers. The announcement is also a big win for “FREE INTERNET” movement. Just think 3 years ago Yahoo was simply offering 4 MEG’s of space per account and trying to CHARGE users 50 bucks for a 100 MEG upgrade. However, the digital media revolution and decreasing cost of drive space has made it more cost effective for service providers to provide expansive storage. Although I currently use Hotmail, I often have had to rely on third-party services like YouSendit to transfer large files to friends and clients. I’m hoping this announcement makes those days a distant memory. Today free storage…tomorrow free water? Who knows.