ryan kennedy’s blog

We rolled out a major new component of the Yahoo! Mail Beta tonight: a built-in RSS reader. Some of you may not think this is such a big deal because Oddpost had one, but it’s a huge deal. Why? Because feeds and mail go together like peas and carrots.

After subscribing to a feed, it shows up as a special folder in your mailbox. When you select a feed, the message list and the preview pane are replaced by a feed view. This allows you to scroll through feed articles and read them one by one. Big deal, so what? Every aggregator does that. But now’s where the integration comes through. You can forward feed articles just like they were another piece of mail. You can drag and drop feed articles into mail folders. Feed articles are treated just like mail messages.

There’s still some work to be done. It’s not perfect, that’s why it’s a beta. Scrolling in the feed list is a little quirky under Firefox. We also still need an OPML import so I can move my 180+ feeds out of Bloglines (you’ve served me well…but it’s time to move on). I’m sure you all will think of other things the RSS aggregator needs, but that’s what the feedback link is for.

Update: Red Herring article

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 29th, 2005 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Yahoo!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.