Yahoo Officially Leaps Into RSS

They've been playing around with it for months, but now it's official - My Yahoo now features RSS capabilities.

This means that if you use My Yahoo as your customized homepage for daily information, you can now add content from hundreds of thousands of RSS-supporting resources out there.

A really nice feature that Yahoo has created for My Yahoo users is the ability to roll their own news feed. Here's Yahoo's official comments on how it works:

Now here's a very cool feature indeed: Create a custom feed to track anything that interests you via Yahoo! News Search. Pick a person (eg, "John Kerry"), a company ("Yahoo!"), or a specific topic ("Windsurfing"). Just type in your search terms, click the "Add-to My Yahoo!" button on the search results page and follow the simple instructions. My Yahoo! will pull the latest headlines from any site that mentions your topic and deliver them right to your page.

In other words, if you do a Yahoo news search for a person, place, or thing, the search results page will contain a link/Add To My Yahoo button, which when clicked, will add that news search to your My Yahoo using a custom RSS feed. This will allow you to monitor that news search for new items as they come in. I agree with Yahoo's statement, this is a very cool feature!

Feedster offers similar functionality on their search results pages; they each contain a custom RSS feed that you can subscribe to that allows you to monitor countless RSS-supporting resources for new news related to your search. Feedster's feeds can be used in practically any newsreader.

In addition, my favorite newsreader, Pluck, has this feature built-in, and in many ways it's more powerful than what Yahoo or Feedster offer!

Pluck allows you to create any number of Perches, or persistent searches (which are similar to Yahoo's roll-you-own feed functionality). But what makes Pluck's implementation of 'search-monitoring' so powerful is that your persistent search isn't limited to news sources, but you can also monitor eBay, Amazon, Google, and (I hear that in the next release) many more sources.

• Collect Beanie Babies? Create an eBay Perch for it so that you'll be automatically be notified of when a new Beanie Baby auction is started.
• Waiting for a new video game to be released? Create an Amazon perch to automatically be notified when it appears in their database, ready for sale.

This is one of those concepts/ideas that I think is going to take the online-world by storm!

A really applaud Yahoo for stepping up to bat with their implementation of RSS. This further legitimizes the technology in way that few other things could.

It'll be interesting to see how, or if, Google responds in any way by implementing RSS themselves. I'd love to create image searches that I could monitor using RSS.

Google, are you listening?!?!