My Yahoo RSS

My Yahoo Beta Tests RSS Feeds – Everyone is buzzing about the fact that Yahoo is beta testing the addition of any RSS feed to it’s My Yahoo portal, a move that may signal an inroad to the mainstream. I didn’t want to comment on this until I had a chance to play with it; today I had that chance. Here are some of my observations. [ “(extlink)Shifted Librarian”:http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com ]

It sounds more like Yahoo is piggybacking on RSS to make it easy to add any website to my.yahoo.com as a channel. Very similar to the way that RSS was originally used by Netscape, and the way it’s used by the “(extlink)uPortal”:http://mis105.mis.udel.edu/ja-sig/uportal/ project. Interesting because it makes it really easy for people to add you to their My Yahoo home-page and view your stories every time they go online, but I don’t see Yahoo wanting to introduce a “(extlink)Bloglines”:http://www.bloglines.com style web aggregator, especially considering their recent focus on paid services.

On the other hand, maybe Yahoo is considering a free trial version integrated into the start page with a higher priced premium one? RSS could potentially be a lot of eyeballs…