Yahoo Mail becomes a full fledged RSS Reader - and messes up with MyYahoo home page

TechCrunch reports that the new Yahoo Mail (still in closed beta ?) now offers the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds and display the content as a river of news, etc. Makes sense.

You can add feeds by entering their URL, or selecting from a very limited set of tech-focused feeds. Bit raw given the ever increasing number of blogs out there. Rojo and BlogBridge have implemented directories of feeds per industry, allowing new blog readers to start somewhere, which is an idea that ought to be considered.

What does not work *at all* for me is that this list of feeds is actually the list of news sources displayed on My Yahoo. Which means that adding/removing feeds from your RSS/Email reader also changes the content of your MyYahoo home page - without any warning or notice. Hello ?Importing the content of MyYahoo would be appropriate, but could we at least get an option to avoid this, as opposed to be forced into using a single list ? I understand that the goal of Yahoo is to democratize RSS, but that is pushing it.

I appreciate that this is beta service, and therefore will suggest that change request as a priority one update.

More:

• Michael Bazeley has additional details: RSS, meet Yahoo Mail
• John Furrier scored another exclusive podcast announcement: PodTech Exclusive: Yahoo! RSS Goes Mainstream with Yahoo! Mail and Alerts

Comments

[Heiko Hebig]

The built-in newsreader over at Oddpost looks very similar to what they now added to Yahoo Mail Beta (no surprise I guess because it's basically the same peolpe now working for Yahoo). One tiny little difference: Over at Oddpost there is an OPML import feature to import a list of feeds for easy mass-subscription. My wild guess here is that the OPML import will be added to Yahoo Mail soon.

[John]

I requested access for the mail beta a few months ago but havent heard anything. Any idea on when we are supposed to gain access? This is a huge new feature for me... goodbye hotmail.