AOL has revealed its plans to open up their email service API to third party developers, so that they can build applications and content on top of the existing email service. Richard Landsman, VP of Technology at AOL believes that "no single company can control all the applications that users will want to use" and therefore allowing third party developers to build application sounds like a perfect plan to give users what they want.

AOL is also trying out Microsoft's Silverlight technology to build a rich, high performance web mail application. Silverlight is a cross platform browser plugin that allows developers to create rich, multimedia internet applications. If everything works well, AOL's new webmail service will go into beta testing by third quarter this year.

We've seen this trend in the social networking segment with Facebook and OpenSocial. AOL Mail will be the first in the email segment to open up their API for third party developers. Honestly, I'm not against the idea of opening up a service to third party developers, but is it really needed for an email service? Only time will tell!