Yahoo Mail’s full post RSS reader

As you can probably guess, I’m a big fan of My Yahoo! And use it as the primary way I keep up with RSS feeds and all sorts of other content. I love it because I can quickly see all my news at a glance in a format of my own choosing. And lots of people agree, its the number one RSS aggregator out there. But, even though over 25 million people use My Yahoo! we’ve wanted to take RSS to an even bigger audience.

Enter Yahoo! Mail. Tonight we are launching a full post rss reader in the new Yahoo Mail beta. If you are in the beta, you’ll automatically get the new features.

RSS in mail makes perfect sense for a few reasons: 1) people already spend a lot of time in their Mail experience, why shouldn’t personally relevant content be there too 2) While you read RSS you are probably gonna want to forward good stuff you find 3) Hundreds of millions of users use Yahoo Mail, so if we want to reach the masses, we need to go where they are.

And, its cool to realize that we are the first major webmail service to offer an RSS reader integrated into the experience.

If you are in the beta check it out, if you are not yet I think they are planning on adding more users soon, so be sure that you are on the waiting list.

In the mean time though, I thought I’d share some screenshots of what it looks like.

The folder area on the new Yahoo Mail, showing the new RSS Feeds
(it uses the same subscriptions you’ve set up on My Yahoo! or if you don’t use My, you can add feeds here, also notice the little gleam next to a feed if there’s new content since you last checked)

A view of how Scripting News looks in the RSS reader
(notice the full posts, and notice how it realizes the first post is new and the others are marked as “Previously Viewed Posts” with a subtle grey color)

We’ve been working on this for a long time, and its finally nice to share it with you. Overall, its another great step in bringing RSS to the masses. We already have a list of things we want to do next, but I can’t wait for the feedback to start coming in from the beta testers.

(BTW, it uses the same RSS backend as My Yahoo, so if you are already pinging us and if you feed is already in My Yahoo, it’ll work just fine in Mail.)

UPDATE: Be sure to read my post about the new Yahoo! Alerts RSS integration, which we also launched.

36 thoughts on “Yahoo Mail’s full post RSS reader”

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  3. This is great news for everyone not named Google. And in the long run, it’s probably great news for Google, too. People like to complain that RSS is too cumbersome to be a widely used tool. That’s true to a certain extent, but I’m pretty certain it won’t stay that way. Yahoo! and the other big players have a huge incentive to make sure people understand RSS — or, more accurately, to make sure people can use it whether they understand it or not. The hand-wringing over RSS’s viabililty is short-sighted and tends to under-estimate the speed of innovation and the drive of competition in the industry right now.

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  6. I am happy to see what Yahoo is doing with their services. Keep up the good work. I just wish that you could use Outlook with Yahoo with out paying for it. Keep up the good work Yahoo! Staff

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  9. Chiru,

    no, Yahoo mail doesn’t offer RSS feeds, you’ll have to read your mail in the yahoo mail interface or use POP to access your mail (if you are Mail Plus user)

  10. I always see that the number of RSS subscribers is made to be an important factor in figuring a blogs value. A lot of so called experts say that each RSS subscriber is equal to $30. This is how folks flipping blogs largely determine the value of a blog. My question is why?
    Who are the folks that subscribe to an RSS feed? I would think that it is mostly internet savvy people right? I personally subscribe to only a few RSS feeds as I would rather go to the blog. A blog has a feel to it and you can’t get that from an RSS feed. I don’t want to get a cup of coffee to read my feeds but I will if I go to the blog. Sounds kinda silly I know but I’m trying to get my point across about a blog having a ‘feel’. Why do people subscribe to feeds? The better question is why do people unsubscribe to feeds. I think most folks unsubscribe not because of things like posting frequency or content value, but rather because most people stop checking their feeds.

    Is RSS reading really all that big? Somehow I get the feeling that feeds are not as important as many make them out to be. I could be wrong (I have no problem admitting that) but I just don’t know what all the fuss is about.

    Sorry for the long winded comment…just had these thoughts on my mind.

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