Yahoo! Search blog: My Yahoo! Mobile RSS

March 10, 2005

My Yahoo! Mobile RSS

Since I'm the resident "mobile blogger guy" here at Yahoo!, I got asked if I'd do a quick write up on the Search blog about a new My Yahoo! mobile launch you might find interesting. My pleasure!

In case you've ever used Yahoo!'s mobile portal and wondered where your My Yahoo! page is, we've got great news. We've just launched a new addition to Yahoo! Mobile which allow you to read the RSS news feeds that you've subscribed to in your My Yahoo! page from your mobile phone's minibrowser.

Check it out: http://mobile.yahoo.com

To see your My Yahoo! subscriptions, enter the above URL in your phone's WAP 2.0 minibrowser and navigate down to the News link. From there click on My Headlines, log in with your Yahoo! ID and all the RSS headlines that you've added to your My Yahoo! page are listed, ready to be read on the go. Clicking on the individual feed links will let you read a summary of the stories (about 1024 characters, which is actually more than appears on the My Yahoo! Web version) and if you've got a phone which has a browser that supports full HTML web pages, each of the headlines will be live links to the original article. Simple and easy.

The key to this new service is accessibility. What we wanted to do is get a mobile version of My Yahoo! out there that works on millions of phones, right this second. No installation required and you don't need a smart phone, third-party browser or a custom Java client to use it. RSS feeds on a mobile phone is a no brainer, and using the phone's built in minibrowser is really the best way to deliver them. If you've got a late-model phone, you can check out your feeds right now with a minimum of fuss (and teach your Mom to do it too).

For the mobile power users out there who want both more control over their feeds and longer summaries (or even full posts), we hear you. This launch is just the tip of the iceberg of what we're planning. Our ultimate goal is to make keeping up your feeds on your mobile device as useful and as easy as it is on the desktop. We're starting simple, but thinking big. (When it comes to mobile, there's no other way to think!)

Even if you use another aggregator for your news (like myself), there's so many times when you want quick access to important news items and don't want to slog through hundreds of headlines on your mobile phone to get to them. I've got over 300 feeds I'm monitoring right this second, but not all of them are needed when I'm on the go. So what I'm doing right now is going through my news feeds of my primary aggregator and picking out some of the important ones that I'd like to be able to quickly access when I'm moving, and adding them to My Yahoo!. Using my phone's bookmark feature, I can get to my mobile RSS page within 15-30 seconds and be browsing the most important news items right away, quickly and easily. Suddenly someone like myself who hasn't used My Yahoo! as much as he could, has a great reason to keep it stocked with great feeds.

We'd love to hear how you're using your My Yahoo! Mobile RSS and hear about your favorite feeds to have while on the go. Leave a comment below with your favorite links.

Russell Beattie
Mobile Yahoo!

Posted by Yahoo!Search at March 10, 2005 02:30 PM | TrackBack

Comments

I can't sign-in in my Nokia 6600's WAP browser or Opera. Is that because my account is Australian?

Posted by: Dave King at March 10, 2005 03:33 PM

I have just tried entering http://mobile.yahoo.com into my Sony Ericsson P900 and the page will not load with the message 'The page contains errors and can not be displayed'..... hmmmmm what am I doing wrong.

Posted by: Mat at March 10, 2005 03:57 PM

Hmmm does this work for smartphones? PocketPCPhones?

Posted by: Dave at March 10, 2005 06:12 PM

I can log in at mobile.yahoo.com but there's no 'My Headlines' link when I click onto the news page. I'm in the UK and I'm using the Nokia 7200's WAP browser.

Posted by: James at March 10, 2005 07:15 PM

In short - a RSS feed to WAP convertor. Nice.

Posted by: Migs at March 10, 2005 08:01 PM

Why can't Yahoo mobile remember your name/password from the last time I logged in to Yahoo Mobile from my phone (Blackberry 7100t)?

It's highly annoying to have to type username & password each time I want to use Yahoo Mobile to access my data .. and .. usually I'll end up just using another service.

Posted by: Sanjay at March 10, 2005 08:16 PM

> I can log in at mobile.yahoo.com but there's no 'My Headlines' link when I click onto the news page. I'm in the UK and I'm using the Nokia 7200's WAP browser.

I'm having the same problem, here in New Zealand. I can access the News section and various types of news but not my RSS subscriptions which I have in my My Yahoo! page. I can't see any "My Headlines" link as well.

Posted by: Sid Yadav at March 10, 2005 08:37 PM

Cannot sign my V3 Motorola phone.

Posted by: miladus at March 11, 2005 04:01 AM

This works great! Now I can get local news and all the obscure news when travel around! Now, if only I could do SyncML against my Yahoo! address book and calendar....

Posted by: Glenn Blinckmann at March 11, 2005 10:10 AM

The mobile My Yahoo sounds like a great idea. Since My Yahoo doesn't get discussed here very often and I can't find a message board for it, I'd like to ask for a few features. I don't use a separate RSS reader for my feeds. My requests apply to the regular My Yahoo WWW pages, not necessarily the WAP version, and are roughly in order of importance:

1. Saved Searches of my feeds. I would really like to be able to search only my feeds and then use those searches as feeds of their own. The Yahoo News search feeds are an outstanding implementation of a similar idea. I'd just like to narrow that down a bit.
2. Mark as Read. I would LOVE to be able to mark RSS articles and feeds in My Yahoo as read so they don't show up when I go back to the page.
3. Highlight Recently Updated Sources. If Reuters:Business has been updated since my last session, highlight it. This goes hand-in-hand with #2.
4. More pages. My Yahoo currently only allows six pages. I'd like more than that.
5. Page Tabs. Add the ability to click a tab to navigate between each My Yahoo page instead of clicking the drop down box.
6. News Headlines/Images. On the current My Yahoo, you're only allowed one lead photo. It would be nice to have a lead photo/headline for more than one category of news. This breaks things up a bit and makes the news easier to read. This would allow me to make the My Yahoo front page like a customized version of Yahoo News.
7. One column pages. I don't use the second column on my sub-pages, so it's just empty space. I'd like to be able to eliminate that empty space by using a single column.
8. Icons/Logos on the feeds. Put the feed's icon or logo next to its name. Again - this breaks up the text and makes the feed more easily identifiable.
9. Digest View. It would be nice to have an easily changeable digest view, which would show all posts from every source in a single list, ordered from newest to oldest. Kinja does this, but not much else. A single click would toggle between digest view and the current source-based view.

You've made a really excellent product. It's much better than any of the other web-based aggregators (Bloglines fonts are way too big!) A few improvements would make it perfect. I would be willing to pay to get these features. Thanks for listening.

Posted by: Carl at March 11, 2005 10:16 AM

Hi Russ,

If you want to try an alternative RSS mobile solution check out http://www.litefeeds.com It is now open to the public for free download & usage.

I am with a start-up that is developing mobile RSS ideas. We have taken a bit of a different approach in that we provide a Java(J2ME) applet that you can install over the air to your phone. Then just import your OPML to our website, choose the feeds you want mobile, and you are good to go.
We are also developing next generation mobile readers, and that is why we decided to go with Java instead of just WAP on the client. Right now you can clip and share articles, and the mobile feeds are cached, compressed, and optimized(large feeds truncated, unread/read only option, HTML stripped etc).

You must be excited about Yahoo!Mobile :) good to see Yahoo embracing RSS so extensively. Well, hope you can give litefeeds a try and give us some feedback. Would be much appreciated!

John Goodall
http://www.litefeeds.com

Posted by: johninspace at March 11, 2005 12:42 PM

Thanks for the great feedback on the My Yahoo! Mobile RSS.

Couple of additional points that several people have commented on:

1) Mobile RSS is (currently) only available on Cingular, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, & T-Mobile xHTML capable browsers. Looking at support for other countries now, some issues we need to work through...

2) Persistent login is supported for most devices on US carrriers. Some handsets are configured to use alternative gateways (Blackberry I think is one, mostly on T-Mobile).

3) If the mobile.yahoo.com URL is not loading try going to wap.oa.yahoo.com...this the direct URL to the US WAP deck.

Posted by: Jason Morse at March 11, 2005 01:39 PM