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Yahoo RSS first thoughts
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22 Jan 2004
I’ve played with the Yahoo RSS beta for all of 5 minutes, and it’s actually pretty decent. You can search for feeds by keyword, which is really useful. I’ll use that feature to find feeds for other aggregators. Your feeds show up in the same style as official Yahoo News sources.
Headlines for recent items from the feed are displayed. I wonder if this will affect how people craft their titles? Many blog titles are less than descriptive. Reading a feed using only the titles from these blogs would be impossible. As My Yahoo becomes a mainstream feed consumer, perhaps people will write better titles.
In addition to keyword searches, you can also enter the URL of a feed of course, or the URL of a Web page, with or without the http://. That’s an important usability step, since many people are used to typing Web addresses without the prefix. But rather than parsing the specified page for links to feeds, as I’d expect, Yahoo seems to use the specified URL as a search against some sort of feed directory. I wonder where their directory is coming from. A search for kalsey.com turns up a link to the original name of my Simplelinks feed, a name it only had for a day. None of my other feeds are listed.
When I enter marketingwonk.com, I get a link to their comments feed, but not their main feed. So their directory needs tweaking. It would also be nice if the requested URL were parsed for link tags pointing to feeds.