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.

I’ve had a busy few days: my birthday, friends from out of town visiting and now I’m off for Thanksgiving. This is the first week since I’ve been blogging that I’ve missed my goal of posting at least 2 times a week.

When I worked in TV, this is the time of the year that we’d trot out old “evergreen” news pieces that we knew we could easily re-run. So, I’ll try it on this blog. If you are a new reader, here are some posts to check out. And remember if you haven’t read one of these posts, “it’s new to you”:

You may have caught the news yesterday that Yahoo Publisher Network has added support for ads in RSS feeds. If you are a YPN beta user, you can now (in addition to having ads on your blog or site) include ads within your full post RSS feed.

This makes me think about the broader question I get asked a lot: “how do I make money with my RSS feed?”. I see that the answer is simple, but it might not be what you expect.

There are a few different ways that you can use RSS to build your business (and its not all about ads)…

  • The Golden Rule: Your feed IS ALREADY an ad
    Just like an email subscription, or a direct-mail piece, your RSS feed allows your brand name, your content, your services to be delivered right into people’s “homes”- their home pages, their email box, or their RSS reader. If you are blogger, your feed is an ad for you, your thoughts & skills – if you are a bigger company – it makes sure that people see whatever it is that you are good at, on a regular basis. It is a great way to develop a “communication channel” to people who want to hear what you have to say. Be sure to remember this as you seek to monetize your feeds further, there’s a balance you are striking with your consumers – be sure to respect them or you’re feed will be in the trash bin.
  • Model #1: RSS as a Traffic Driver
    Most people publishing RSS today use it as way to get people to come back to their site regularly and they already know how to monetize traffic on their site. RSS is a way to convert your once-in-a-while visitors into repeat daily visitors. You give up headlines and summaries (the model popularized by My Yahoo!) and people see the headlines every day and click through when they see articles of interest. You see increased traffic from these users, and your page views per user and revenue per user go up. This model is used most by traditional publishers/media companies.
  • Model #2: Commerce Feeds
    To me, this is one of the most interesting new areas for RSS. Traditional and upcoming commerce sites are using RSS as a way to get new products, deals of the day, or other interesting commerce in front of users regularly. Surprisingly, consumers are eating this up. One of the most popular modules on My Yahoo is woot! – the deal of the day RSS feed – every day they put a new product on sale through the feed, interested people click the link and buy the products. Some other great examples: Ben’s Bargains, Y! Shopping new DVD releases and iTunes top sellers. Consumers looking to buy a category of stuff get a great experience and you get sales. This model is used most by commerce companies with large product catalogs or small deal-focused companies.
  • Model #3: Full post RSS feeds with ads.
    This is a new area where we all have a lot to learn. The question is this: what if all of your content was consumed off of your site, how would you monetize it then? RSS allows you to publish your entire blog post or your whole news story and let consumers read that in their full-post reader, on their mobile device or wherever. To the user, they get the ability to read offline and to have a uniform presentation. Some people say that in the future all content will be syndicated this way – others say its untenable. So what a lot of people are trying is to ship ads along with the content. Some sites actually syndicate the same ads that appear on their site, some sell sponsorships to a feed and others are using contextual advertising right in the feed. Support for contextual advertising in feeds is what the Yahoo Publisher Network just launched. They are just starting with bloggers, but you add a few simple lines of HTML to your blog’s RSS template and voila! you are making money on your full post feed. I’ve got contextual YPN ads running in my feed as well, so if you read me in a full-post reader, check-em out. This model is mostly used by bloggers (who mostly publish full text) and a few blogger-like media sites like Weblogs.com and Gawker media’s properties.

So when you take a look at it, there’s more than meets the eye when it comes to building your business with RSS. One thing is for sure – if you are thinking about doing all the models at once, you’ve got it wrong. Look for the model that meets your needs and focus on making it successful. If you are Purina and are focusing on RSS feeds with Pet Tips, you clearly are following the golden rule: your feed itself is the ad. To try to add in more ads wouldn’t make sense, could dilute your brand message and isn’t focused on your core objectives. If you are a small topical publication, maybe you want to focus on contextual ads as your best way to monetize your content and allow users to consume it wherever. And maybe if you are a large media company, model #1 suits you just fine.

So take the time, focus on your goals and your brand image, try some things and remember that you and the user are building a daily relationship – don’t violate their trust and end up in the “unsubscribe” bin.

Here is my bold statement:

By the end of 2006, all content on the web will be available in a subscribable format (RSS, Atom, whatever).

This is both a challenge to the industry and a firm belief that we can make this happen.

But then I see this post from Cori Schlegel. He looked at all the tech companies that presented at a conference and found that sadly, only 4 out of 32 offered their news, press releases, etc via RSS. Cory wrote:

Now, I know I’ve been drinking the kool-aid, and I really didn’t expect all of these companies to have blogs, but I thought more than 1 in 10 of participants in “a one-day showcase of early-stage innovation” would be able to see the value of providing their news, white papers, and other timely information in RSS.

I’m not sure that the world really needs to subscribe to info about some of these companies (nor do many care) but the point of RSS is that even if there are only 30 people in the world who care, let them subscribe. It’s odd if we are living in a world where traditional media companies “get it” before the tech companies do.

So, if you have a site with regularly updating content, make it available via RSS now! Its easy, some of your customers will love it, and we’ll all be one step closer to making this true:

By the end of 2006, all content on the web will be available in a subscribable format (RSS, Atom, whatever).

Jeremy Zawodny posted (in reaction to Reading the Google Tea Leaves) his opinion that Google is building Yahoo 2.0.:

it’s as if someone decided to re-invent more and more of Yahoo’s popular services in random order, giving them a fresh user interface, less historical baggage, and usually one feature that really stands out (such as Gmail’s storage limit or Google Talk’s use of Jabber).

Dave Winer responded quite astutely:

Very clever, and there’s a lot of truth to it, but watch out, that’s not a very good place to be. That’s how Microsoft came to dominate the PC software industry…. It’s better to produce your own 2.0s…

I really look at the whole thing another way. Google is replaying Yahoo’s playbook circa 1996. Back then, we simply looked at what people were searching for and then built services that they wanted. Filo called the query logs “our to-do list”.

I tend to think that we’ve got a head start in understanding users and how they react to the way we roll out new features. We got to be the #1 way that people read RSS by knowing how the masses wanted to subscribe to new info, we broke convention in the way RSS was consumed (it doesn’t have to only be in a mail metaphor) and it paid off for us.

If Google really is trying to do what we did 10 years ago, of course they are gonna try to be “Yahoo done better” and that’s something to really watch out for. Yahoo! Maps was a leading product and Google launched Yahoo Maps 2.o – and you all loved it. That sucked for Yahoo. Now we launched a better maps, but we should have launched the new Yahoo Maps before they did.

So Dave – you are right. If Yahoo’s gonna win, we need to take our 10 years of experience and launch our own Yahoo 2.0 well before MSFT and GOOG know what’s happening.

In my job, I get to meet lots of people at startups and big companies, and more and more I’m reminded of the fact that successful companies are all about the people. Back in my startup days, VCs and advisors always looked really closely at the team and the people as a indicator of potential success. At the time I really didn’t understand, but now that I’m exposed to as many companies as those VCs see, I get it.

When I first started at Yahoo seven years ago I knew I walked into a very special place. I realized that I had just walked into a company full of incredibly smart people who were practical and passionate and could execute. It took me a while to get comfortable and to work at their level, but I knew we were gonna do lots of great things.

Now when I look at startups, I look to see if they have what I first saw in Yahoo:

  • Company A – This company got a lot of initial buzz about its founder and the area they were entering into, and got a bunch of initial usage from folks “in the know”. Since then though, the company hasn’t seemed to take off. When I met their head of BD at a conference (one of about only 10 employees), he struck me as someone who just wasn’t very happy in his job, wasn’t very excited about the product and overall really wished he could be doing something else. On top of that, he struck me as not really “getting” all the great things we see transforming the web. Here’s a guy that should be exciting and passionate, but I was left feeling like this company wasn’t going to be the darling we all expected it to be.
  • Company B – This company really doesn’t have the buzz of company A, but is plugging away at doing interesting things and my guess is that they are hoping to be acquired by Yahoo, Google or MSN. I had a similar experience though when I met their BD guy. He just rambled on about things that made it clear that he really didn’t understand the space. I later met the CEO and other members of the team and felt that they do have some good folks, so my verdict here is mixed. Overall, their performance has been mixed. Their products get a little attention, but don’t seem to ignite a lot of passion from users or the community. Is the root cause that they have hired a mixed bag of people?
  • Company C – This company seems to be taking off like a rocket. From the moment I met the people from this company I was impressed. They all were talented, passionate and execution oriented and they reminded me of how I felt when I started at Yahoo: they were all smarter than me. One by one as I met these guys it was clear that this company was going places. As they’ve hired, I’ve met their new employees and they are of the same high caliber as the others. This company’s results have been stellar, they are innovating like crazy and I’m now always keeping a close eye on what they are up to. They’ve figured out the formula.

I guess the moral of the story is that the most important thing anyone can do in their job is to hire the best people. People who are passionate, focused, smart and more than capable. I’ve been lucky to find such people for my team at Yahoo! If I ever were to go down the startup path, hiring the best people would be my #1 priority, because I want to end up like Company C.

Ok, so I so kinda understand why people would spam blog comments. They hope to drive traffic to their site by either increasing pagerank or getting people to click on the links. But in the last few weeks, I’ve been getting tons of very similar comment spam. They all come from different IP addresses but list a jibberish sentence in the comment:

It’s been a long time since I so enjoyed reading posts in the net. Two thumbs up! thins that excited you at 14, substances that cure you , my parents didnt told me about it

Those last 3 phrases have links that go to Sun, Adobe, Panasonic and Yahoo! None of these companies (I hope) would be hiring someone to increase their PR, so I’m completely baffled as to what’s going on.

The only crazy idea I can come up with is that the spammers are using some sort of learning technique to figure out what will go through filters and what will get blacklist. Once they learn the technique, then they swap the URLS? Does anyone know?

I have a birthday coming up in a few weeks and Craig and I sat down to set up an Evite for the party. In the process however, I came across one of the worst error message schemes ever and just had to point it out.

We couldn’t remember if Craig already had an account, so we just started to register again. It was actually a simple registration form and we quickly hit submit. Then:

You have entered invalid data. Please check the errors below.

The error below was telling us that the email address was already used. We fixed that and moved on.

But I came back later and tried a bunch of different things on the form: 1) leaving fields blank 2) typing the wrong password to log in 3) using an existing email address and all of them led to: You have entered invalid data? Come on…in one sentence you blame me, you use a technical term (data) and you call what I typed “invalid” even if its just that I accidentally forgot to fill out a field.

I’m picking on evite a little here, but it’s a supposition I see on too many web sites today: its the user’s fault. And maybe it is, but it’s time to use that sage old advice: “it’s not what you say, but how you say it”. Just take a little time to make your error messages helpful and appropriate for whatever the error – it’s not that hard and it’ll make me feel that you are actually on my side.

The Yahoo! Maps team just released a new beta (and a great new set of Maps APIs) that is very cool.

At first, I wasn’t sure about the idea of doing some stuff using AJAX and a big chunk using flash, but after using it for a while, I’ve really grown to like it. It’s a HUGE improvement over old Yahoo Maps (and I really liked Y! Maps before). This release finally helps bring us up to snuff with the interactivity that GMaps had and then adds a bunch on top. I tried it on Mac Safari and Win IE and both worked well for me.

Some of my favorite things:

  • Point-to-point-to-point driving directions. Instead of just point A to Point B, you can set up a route (great for “lets grab lunch then go to the amusement park” type stuff)
  • integrated local search – type any search term and “find on map”. You can also browse through stuff. In old maps they used to call this “SmartView”, but they’ve integrated this with the new Y! Local, so the data is even better.
  • The APIs – now you can embed a map right into your page (only the other guy’s APIs used to let you do that). And beyond simple integration, you can add all sorts of controls to your site to control the map as well.
  • You can actually bookmark a map. Drag around the map, find your spot and you can bookmark it where you left off (also can email it too). I dragged my map all the way to Chicago where my family lives, zoomed in and bookmarked it. Those other guys can’t do that!
  • Drag, zoom, scroll -all the interactivity is there that you’d expect. use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom; drag the map; use that little box in teh corner to move pretty far away. nicely done.

The APIs look really robust, I’m not a wiz like other folks, but I was able to quickly embed this map for where I work. Drag it around; click on the marker to see my picture. Kinda fun (if I could do this so easily, I hope people with talent can do some cooler mashups).

#mapContainer { height: 250px; width: 370px; border:1px solid gray;}

// Capture the user mouse-click and expand the SmartWindow
function onSmartWinEvent() {
var words = “
Scott at Yahoo!
“;
marker.openSmartWindow(words);
}
// Create a lat/lon object
var myPoint = new YGeoPoint(37.416384, -122.024853);
// Create a map object
var map = new YMap(document.getElementById(‘mapContainer’));
// Display the map centered on a latitude and longitude
map.drawZoomAndCenter(myPoint, 3);
// Create a marker positioned at a lat/lon
var marker = new YMarker(myPoint);
// Add a label to the marker
marker.addLabel(“Me“);
// Call onSmartWinEvent when the user clicks on the marker
YEvent.Capture(marker, EventsList.MouseClick, onSmartWinEvent);
// Display the marker
map.addOverlay(marker);

var navWidget = new NavigatorWidget();
// Add the Navigator Widget to the map and display it
map.addWidget(navWidget);

Congrats to the Maps team. Be sure to check out their blog post and they have a mailing list going for comments.

UPDATE: So I guess there are people doing smarter things than my silly map. Jeremy blogs about a demo I saw floating around at work. Seems like a bunch of folks like Chad Dickerson, Ed Ho and a bunch of others did a great events viewer. Toni did a fun silicon valley map, and it oddly places the center of the map very near to yahoo. 😉

Another off-topic post today, but I couldn’t resist (it does involve my old profession though)

Top of the RockToday, for the first time in over 20 years, the “Top of the Rock” re-opens in New York City. The “Top of the Rock” is the observation deck on the top floor of 30 Rockefeller Center and since 1933 was one of only two places (the other was the Empire State) to see NYC from above until the World Trade Center was built.

Even though the observation deck wasn’t open when I lived in NYC, I was lucky enough to get a personally escorted tour of the roof deck when I worked at NBC in 1991. We were planning to do a shoot with Tom Brokaw up there and so the building manager took us up a crickety old elevator. From the moment the doors opened it was clear that this was an art deco masterpiece (albeit covered in two inches of dust and debris). The interior lobby and restaurant area was a showcase of 1930s art deco style with marble floors, period details and large windows that opened out onto a stunning roof deck. I wish I could remember more of the details to share them with you, but I remember feeling like I had stepped into the past and was able to get a special peek at something very special.

Top of the RockOnce out on the deck the view was magnificent. To the north you have a great view of Central Park which is only a few blocks away and relatively unobscructed. To the South you have a clear view of the Empire State and midtown unfolding before you. While not as clear of a view as it must have been in the 30s, you can still see both the Hudson and East Rivers as well. I’d argue that this is the best view of NY to be had (and of course the building manager thought so too).

That visit excited me so much that I ended up reading a bunch on 1930s deco architecture afterwards and the experience stuck with me for a long time. I can’t tell from the pictures, but I hope they kept a lot of what I saw. I’ll have to go back next time I’m in NYC and if you make it, be sure to tell me what you thought.

Photos Courtesy of Rockefeller Center Archives