Yahoo! moving to integrate RSS with email
Yahoo! email Beta in a handful of countries, excluding the US and most recently including Canada, now includes a number of interesting
new features. (Correction: I learned in comments below that Yahoo was offering RSS in its email system
for US users some time ago.) Drag and drop email organization sounds more AJAXian than GMail! Perhaps most
important, though, is the baked in support for RSS. MyYahoo! has already had huge success in introducing new users to
RSS (many of whom don't know that's what they are using - not that that's a real big deal) and I can only presume that
YahooMail integration of RSS has even greater potential. The company's press release describes its leverage of
syndication in a way that sounds more sophisticated than the relatively anemic implementation in MyYahoo. Anyone
in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany, France or Korea care to comment here on how seriously a Yahoo Mail
user can use RSS?
Reader Comments
(Page 1)2. Elroy, that's a pretty good point right there. I think the RSS feeds will be delivered in a different pane and will thus be seperate from the spam filled inbox - for what that's worth.
Posted at 1:30PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
3. The U.S. version has had this functionality in place for a while--at least mine does (your RSS feeds are in a folder in the left task pane... they work okay, but they're not going to replace Bloglines anytime soon).
Posted at 5:04PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Ryan
4. Yahoo! Mail in the US launched this integrated RSS reader in the beta back in November. See CNET News.com story http://news.com.com/Yahoo+spoons+out+more+RSS/2100-1025_3-5976150.html?tag=nefd.top
Posted at 6:02PM on Mar 21st 2006 by karen
5. I stand corrected and offer my most sincere apology.
Posted at 6:05PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
6. I read about 100 feeds in the Yahoo! Mail Beta. Works great.
It's more of a blog type view, not the click-headline-to-read-me type. This helps to easily skim and ignore the non-relevant stuff.
See how it works here: http://overview.mail.yahoo.com/ca
Having my mails and my feeds in the same interface (but separate) makes a lot of sense to me.
Posted at 9:26PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Dave
7. That's a really interesting little video! Unsurprisingly, it doesn't appear that the system has a "river of news" option, nor is it shown how to subscribe to feeds other than the preselected ones.
I have a strong preference for Newsgator, but thanks for the discussion and link to the vid.
Posted at 9:31PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick
8. You get a river of news view by clicking on 'All RSS Feeds' (rather than a specific feed). I have too many feeds though so that this is not really useful for me.
There are several ways to add a feed:
- Click on any of the 'Add to Yahoo' buttons out there
- Add the RSS URL in the dialog (you can see the textfield quickly in the flash demo)
- Use My Yahoo! to manage your feeds
Posted at 9:49PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Dave
9. You can get the "river of news" view by clicking on the "All RSS Feeds" (rather than an individual feed). I personally prefer individual feeds (click on arrow and see which feeds have new items).
You can subscribe to feeds in multiple ways:
- "Add to Yahoo" buttons on lots of blogs
- Use My Yahoo! to manage feeds
- Add Feed dialog (you can see the text box quickly in the Flash demo)
Posted at 11:26PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Dave
1. I can personally think of no quicker way to kill RSS than to integrate it into e-mail.
E-mail has been all but abandoned to spammers and poor technology decisions years ago. So lets take a technology in its death throws and merge in a technology that is more useful like RSS.
Recipe for disaster. Seems like a step backward to me.
Posted at 1:28PM on Mar 21st 2006 by Elroy Jetson