Yahoo gathered a small group of bloggers, press and others at Sauce in San Francisco tonight to announce the launch of two new RSS products. They have integrated an RSS reader directly into Yahoo Mail Beta, and are expanding Alerts to include RSS feeds.
These are significant new products, aimed squarely at new and mainstream RSS users. The service is not live as of the time I am posting this. I’ve added a screen shot picture from the live demo.
Yahoo has deeply integrated RSS into the Yahoo Mail beta experience. Directly below the email folders are “RSS folders”. Clicking on the top folder show all posts in a “river of news” format, meaning all posts for all subscribed feeds are listed in the order they have appeared in feeds.
Each feed also has its own folder, allowing the user to read feeds individually (more like bloglines).
A post from any feed is treated exactly like an email - any post can be forwarded as an email or dragged into a folder and saved. All of the great AJAX functionality already working in Yahoo’s Mail beta works with the new RSS functionality as well.
Adding feeds is straightforward - include the feed URL or choose from a number of popular feeds.
Alerts
Yahoo users can now use Yahoo Alerts to be notified whenever RSS feeds update. Alerts, which include a summary of the updated content, can be configured to be sent via sms, email and/or messenger. This is a great way to monitor small groups of important feeds.
Yahoo clearly took the lead for best email application this evening. The ability to “pop in” other email accounts, the ajax functionality and, now, the integrated RSS reader are absolutely stunning features.
John Furrier was at the event tonight as well, and as usual has an exclusive podcast.
UPDATE: RSS in Yahoo Mail is now fully live. As Jeff Clavier says, My Yahoo and Yahoo Mail syncronize feeds - a long list in email doesn’t work so well in My Yahoo. I spoke to Scott Gatz at Yahoo about this earlier this evening and he says they’ll find a fix for it. There are a few other features which still need to be added, but Yahoo Mail is just an incredibly awesome product.
Very cool! thanks for the heads up.. now I might be able to make yahoo mail my start page instead of netvibes.com…
maybe.
C’ mon Google! Where’s your answer to this? And your calendar? WUZZUP? I need these features, dammit.
In my opinion goowy should be best email application available with all its features. They do have a inbuilt RSS readers, widgets[delicious,flickr, technorati] and all those. Though i havent used the yahoo mail alpha, I still believe that goowy would be better(just my opinion). What do you expect of the microsoft’s live.com mail service??
The decider for me on Yahoo is the fact that they plaster their email with advertisements. THey use the colorful, animated, explosively distracting kind, too. If they got a little Googlier and discreet in that area I’d give them a chance.
I went here looking for it but can’t find it (and I’ve had a Y! email account for years!
http://alerts.yahoo.com/main.php?view=create
Not only have they not publicized it, I can’t find it even after you say it finally went live, got a URL? TIA
I signed up for beta invitation long time back and still no news. When is it expected to be out?
Hey Yahoo! Real nice but how about letting some paying customers actually USE this! WTF!
Can anyone verify whether Yahoo Mail suppoorts secure (password-protected, encrypted) feeds?
-c
when are they going to release the beta for public? I am tired of hearing these posts about this UI rocking and this feature sucking! c’mmon let the product out before the gas dies!
Big deal. RSS Readers are nothing more than a commodity. Everybody has a RSS reader feature built in as they are very easy to create.
The whole model/concept of users subscribing to RSS feeds is tired.
Tagging is what I’m excited about. Tagging allow users to find headlines on topics that interest them from a wide diverse group of content contributors.
I’m personally tired of certain partisan media outlets wanting to tell me what is going on in the world with their conservative/liberal slant. Thanks to sites like technorati, google news and my stuff, things are changing.
I want a diverse group of news journalists, bloggers and everyday commenters to report on topics I’m interested in and I decide objectively.
Anyone know what the procedure is for getting into the Yahoo Mail Beta? Would really like to try it out.
http://surveylink.yahoo.com/wix/p0473306.aspx
Google is better. You’re all idiots.
I don’t think they’ve put alerts for blogs up yet. I looked on the alerts page and there’s nothing for that. And when I emailed their help on when it’s going to be activate, they responded with a thank you for the feature recommendation.
How can anyone say that yahoo mail is better than gmail, when its not even out for public consumption?
ill make my decisions based on “my” experience with a product rather than some “blogger” (or a WSJ article for that matter), telling me what is good and what isnt.
sk15 -
I agree completely. Yahoo Mail needs to launch to the public. But it is extremely cool.
It’s not fully live. I still get the old old stuff.
I can’t wait to see what this looks like. My guess is that most Yahoo! Mail users will ignore their new RSS folder at first, but that a good buzz might just get many of them to take notice. I’ve tried explaining RSS to my dad and I keep getting blank stares - anyone know where I could find a simple explanation?
Easton (#31) - Pluck has a good resource at http://www.pluck.com/rss/index.html. In the end, you’ll need to get him set up at My Yahoo or some other basic reader to understand its power.
Ah, and now the agenda behind last week’s “I don’t like orange” piece on FeedBlitz is clear. (Who, me, bitter?).
So let’s see. This may be incrementally cooler for users (which users? better than what? earlier yahoo mail?) but it does nothing for RSS content *publishers* in terms of metrics, control or, say it is’t so, for users not in yahoo. That’s where FeedBlitz scores.
Looking at the GUI they’re clearly treating RSS differently - and FWIW I think that’s dead wrong. It’s all information, the fact that it’s coming from a different source ought to be hidden from users, not thrust into their faces.
This is simply the old MS strategy reinvented for the web - tie the readers into a single platform for all those ads (bear in mind who yahoo’s customer (as opposed to user) base is). Asking google to do the same asks them to take the same path (which is fine FWIW), but misses the point IMHO - RSS-based *applications* need to come to the forefront and RSS per se needs to disappear into the fabric of the Net; and publishers using RSS need to get their feeds into users hands regardless of the mail (or mobile or other application) client they’re using.
Anyway. Is this what “web 2.0″ has become? We’re all supposed to get excited because another mail client from a large vendor adds RSS support?
Perhaps I got out of bed the wrong side today, but if that’s the case it’s tragic.
Hi Phil,
I have no idea where the feedblitz connection/my agenda comes in, but I disagree with your main point - that this isn’t exciting. Yahoo Mail now gives high end RSS reader capabilities along with a feature rich email client, all on the same dashboard. Like My Yahoo, tools like these will do much to drive RSS usage for mainstream users.
Glad to see you are a regular reader now. Let’s talk about feedblitz and how it can be better offline.
This is all good and all - but I have a SBC/Yahoo DSL account - if i try to goto mail.yahoo.com i get redirected to my sbc/yahoo mail page instead. Dose any one have a direct link to the yahoo mail beta?
Thanks Michael. I’ve just posted about all this. The portal wars (Yahoo, Google, MSN, Ask, etc.) continue to intensify!
como descargo el programa no me da opcion
el TECHCRUNC;S
now i wish for an import script to get all the feeds from my shrook account.
I got access to the Yahoo Mail beta today and I have found the RSS feeds not to work at all.
Basically I get a “There was a problem loading your feed list. Please contact Yahoo! Customer Care if the problem persists. [ERROR_INCOMPLETE]” error when trying to access the feeds through Yahoo! Mail.
They show up fine on the My Yahoo page.
Basically I get a “There was a problem loading your feed list. Please contact Yahoo! Customer Care if the problem persists. [ERROR_INCOMPLETE]†error when trying to access the feeds through Yahoo! Mail.
They show up fine on the My Yahoo page.
Gmail recently added an RSS reader to follow up Yahoo! Mail Beta’s RSS Reader. In this latest battle of the Great Email War of 2005, Google loses many soldiers. The town of Googletopia is pillaged and its women raped. Children run crying in the streets, screaming, “Why Kings Page and Brin have you forsaken us?†Blood stains the streets, neighboring citizens say a prayer for their lost brethren, and Yahoo! Generals eat heartily tonight. […]
i love having yahoo.com and would like to have voice alert
I was wondering if anyone had an extra invitation for the Yahoo! mail beta?
how do i get beta yahoo mail?!?!
how can i get yahoo mail beta??
i’m glad to see that Yahoo! is making some nice changes. Just looking at the UI it looks alot like the Zimbra project.
I’ve 2 or 3 gmail addresses but the trouble of moving my main e-mail from yahoo was just too much after 9 years or so .. ( wow has e-mail been around that long?)
every time I go to get my mail and I look when I sent the message it gives me a different time than the time really is I live in Florida so please fix
see I just posted # 69 and the time really is 6:18pm and it says its 3:18pm I don’t know what to do and my time clock on my pc is right
When is the new Yahoo Mail gonna be released? I really can’t live without RSS feeds. Especially R-mail kept missing on some important links.
How do i get yahoo mail beta without signing up, is there a way?
I have tried to use My Yahoo and Alerts for an encrypted feed. When I try to Add Content, specifying HTTPS://xxx, My Yahoo appends HTTP:// to the front, resulting in HTTP://HTTPS://xxx, which of course fails. Without specifying HTTPS, I can’t access the feed. Is there a way around this? What would it take for Yahoo to fix this and support encrypted feeds like other online aggregators like NewsGator? Is there any other online aggregator that will convert RSS feeds to emails, preferably optionally (like Yahoo), so some feeds can be emailed and others just aggregated for online access?
Here http://www.yourlivewire.net/AJAX_RSS_Feed_Reader is yet another AJAX RSS Feed Reader which display RSS Feeds in draggable auto-arranging AJAX Feed Windows which self-update using AJAX as RSS Feed is updated.
i could not open my mail
I also use the RSS_Feed_Reader and would recommend it.
when i go to email and to send a email–it pops up, but there is no message box, to write email message. there is only a subject and to whom box..but where do i put message i want to send