• by Ross Fadner , September 30, 2004

In a move that may signal a tipping point for a promising new online distribution technology, Yahoo! has quietly made several key enhancements to its RSS offerings that industry analysts say mark the first big push to take the format mainstream. RSS (rich site summary, or really simple syndication) feeds have been available on Yahoo!'s My Yahoo! service for few months, but on Tuesday the portal unveiled a searchable database of more than 150,000 content and service feeds for a new beta version of My Yahoo!, as well as an RSS information page.

The idea, the company said, is to educate both users and consumers and publishers about the format. Previously, My Yahoo! users had to educate themselves. Instructions for publishers on how to distribute their content via RSS are also included on the site.

RSS is a syndication standard that enables publishers to easily distribute their content via XML feeds. Users receive the feeds through RSS readers, or aggregators, which are downloadable software applications that continuously scan publisher sites' in order to deliver updated content in real-time.

Gartner Group Analyst Allen Weiner called Yahoo!'s move an "extraordinary step forward," noting that the new visibility will make the format accessible to My Yahoo!'s considerable mass of 20 million users.

"Widespread adoption is happening largely because of the efforts of forward-thinking companies like Yahoo," said Chris Pirillo, technology evangelist and publisher of the popular RSS/tech blog Lockergnome.com. Pirillo said he has been in close contact with several Yahoo! thought leaders in recent months. "They're helping fuel the syndication fire," he said.

Both Weiner and Royal Farros, president and chief executive officer of MessageCast, an open network messaging technology firm, noted that Yahoo! has also greatly facilitated the process of gathering feeds. When users choose to add content to their My Yahoo! page, a link to RSS feeds is prominently displayed. Then, to receive a feed, users simply click an "add" button, instead of cutting and pasting the URLs of XML-coded Web pages. Feeds are continuously updated on the My Yahoo! page.

In fact, RSS is barely mentioned at all--Yahoo! simply refers to its RSS links as content feeds.

Weiner noted that organizing the content in such a manner "opens up RSS, and makes the technology kind of invisible, so all you get is the benefit of it." MessageCast's Farros compared Yahoo!'s deployment of the technology to the way Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) effectively changed e-mail without most people realizing it. "It's hard to make RSS sexy in the same way SMTP isn't sexy. It's an enabling technology," he said.

"At the most senior levels of this company, people are so excited about the potential of this technology," said Yahoo! spokesperson Helena Maus. She added that a Yahoo! editorial team will maintain the list of available feeds, featuring certain ones each day.

According to Maus, the Web-based My Yahoo! RSS service also addresses the issue of overloading publisher bandwidth. My Yahoo!'s taps each publisher site once on behalf of all subscribed-to feeds, instead of on an individual basis, which could effectively overload publishers' servers.

"RSS will absolutely be the key enabler of information going forward," Farros said, noting that the implications for widespread adoption move beyond merely distributing and receiving content. He said the technology could potentially impact everything from e-mail and e-commerce to the way corporations maintain their massive internal databases.

Significantly, the syndication process from the user's perspective is completely opt-in and anonymous--two crucial factors that lead industry pundits like Farros to believe that in the long run, RSS could displace e-mail and e-mail marketing.