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Yahoo delivers syndicated feeds to mobile devices
By Juan Carlos Perez

Yahoo Inc. has created another link between its My Yahoo service, which lets users aggregate content and services on a single Web page, and mobile devices, such as cell phones and personal digital assistants.

Specifically, Yahoo announced Thursday that, for the first time, users will be able to access via their mobile devices the My Yahoo syndicated Web content feeds they subscribe to.

A syndicated feed is a service that lets a Web publisher broadcast content out to subscribers using standards such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom.

Now, when users log in to My Yahoo from their mobile devices, they will have access to their syndicated feeds, whereas previously these were only available when using My Yahoo from a PC.

This is the latest My Yahoo service the vendor offers via mobile devices. Other My Yahoo features offered via mobile devices include e-mail alerts, weather data, sports scores and stock information.

The access to My Yahoo syndicated feeds is available in the U.S. to subscribers of all major wireless carriers, including the recently merged Cingular Wireless LLC/AT&T Wireless; Verizon Communications Inc.; T-Mobile USA Inc.; and Sprint Corp. and Nextel Communications Inc., which are in the process of merging. Yahoo doesn't charge for the access, but carriers may apply fees.

To access their My Yahoo syndicated feeds, users need to find the Yahoo Mobile Internet service on their mobile devices, log in, click on the "news" section and look for an option called "My headlines," which contains the feeds.

Depending on the type of device and data-transfer functionality, users will be able to only view headlines, or to view headlines and a portion of the article's text, or to link to the article's Web page to read it in its entirety.

"When we designed this, we were thinking about how to extend My Yahoo syndicated feeds beyond the desktop and bring that functionality to the mobile Internet," said Scott Gatz, Yahoo's senior director of personalization products.

This service is part of a larger and ongoing strategy at Yahoo to extend its content and services to mobile devices, Gatz said. "We want to give our users more of the functionality they love about Yahoo anywhere they go beyond the desktop. That's been our focus and why we're doing this," he said.

Posted March 12, 2005 04:35 PM |