Yahoo! Mail Beta Adds RSS

Yahoo! again demonstrates its facility with RSS by adding feeds to the beta Mail which is still in restricted distribution. (Original review of it here.) Yahoo! Mail takes advantage of the Outlook-styled interface to create an intuitive RSS package. It's preloaded with selected feeds, and, remarkably, that selection appears personalized. I'm waiting for confimration of this, but it seems that the preset feeds are taken from profile information and personal-interest choices in Yahoo! 360. Naturally, that information wouldn't be available for every user in a wide rollout of the new Yahoo! Mail, but millions of people have Yahoo! IDs that contain a bit of profiling, so perhaps Yahoo! plans to mine every bit if personalizable information it can get. I'm all for it. This level of integration makes for a satisfying experience from the first click.



Of course, you can add feeds. Yahoo! provides a recommended list of about 25 feeds, asnd users can specify an RSS address. NOTE: Users should be able to paste in a Web-page address also, and the feed reader should have the smarts to find the feed; Yahoo! has started a tradition of RSS invisiblity in My Yahoo!, and it should be carried over into Mail.

Somewhat oddly, Yahoo! presents the feed in a three-pane view: feed list on the left, feed items in the middle ... and nothing in the right-hand vertical pane. I expected the source page for the feed item to appear in that pane, and was disappointed to see Yahoo! opening a new browser window to display that page. that system works best on some monitors and resolutions, granted. I'd like to have a view choice. Put the source page in the same window as the feed item, and you're really starting to emulate a desktop newsreader. Since Yahoo! mail (beta) emulates a desktop mail program, this would make sense.

Good start! Excellent start. Yahoo! is going to have one rowdy, boat-rocking launch when the new Mail emerges from beta.

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