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 New Yahoo! Mail Interface – email view
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)
After clicking on an engadget post, I hit forward, and it forwards a post as an email, even uses my addressbook with autocomplete.
I can also drag and drop a post into one of my folders to save for later
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.