Yesterday, the world’s largest online service provider announced a trial and will only release the RSS reading tool in Yahoo Mail as an invitation-only feature. This is part of their “RSS Everywhere” campaign that they began two years ago.
Users can choose from available RSS feeds (such as those from BBC, The New York Times, or various blogs) or manually enter any desired links. The inbox is equipped with features like automatic forwarding of content via email and notification alerts when new RSS content is available. Notably, the “news stream” allows users to view all information from the feeds in order from the newest to older content.
Yahoo also offers a “Feed Alert” service, a feature built on the Yahoo Alerts platform, which notifies users via email, instant messaging (IM), or mobile phone whenever a blog or feed they are subscribed to updates or changes.
Scott Gatz, the Director of Yahoo’s personalization services, explained this decision: “RSS in email is a bold move. People spend a lot of time on email, so why not provide the content they need right there? Additionally, when reading RSS, they may want to forward interesting content to their friends. Moreover, if we want to reach and attract hundreds of millions of users of Yahoo Mail, we must ‘follow’ to meet their needs.”
The “RSS Everywhere” initiative was initiated by Yahoo in January 2004 when they incorporated this feature into My Yahoo. Microsoft is also developing a similar plan and has announced that they will integrate RSS into the Windows Vista operating system and Windows Live. Many users are currently waiting for Google to adopt this technology and integrate RSS into Gmail.
| RSS Technology has 3 Standards: Rich Site Summary (RSS 0.91) RDF Site Summary (RSS 0.9 and 1.0) Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0.0) This technology allows Internet users to subscribe to sites that provide RSS feeds, which are typically pages with continuously updated or changing content. To use it, website owners will create or integrate specialized software (such as a content management system) that can display a summary along with a link to the full article. This information is distributed in the form of XML files, known by various names such as RSS feed, webfeed, RSS stream, or RSS channel. |
P.T.
