• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, March 11, 2005

In appreciation of the advent of both RSS and mobile Internet access, Yahoo! yesterday said it will now offer users who have signed up for e-mail or other services access to their personalized My Yahoo! headlines, including RSS, stock portfolios, sports, weather, and My Email, through Yahoo!'s Mobile Internet service.

"This will allow the 20 million Americans using My Yahoo! to take the customized news platforms they've created anywhere their mobile phones can go," Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products at Yahoo!, said.

The new functionality is available across all major wireless carriers based in the United States--Cingular/AT&T Wireless, Sprint/Nextel, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless--and at no cost to consumers. According to a Yahoo! statement, however, carrier fees may apply based on consumers' phone plans.

In order to access personalized content away from their desktops, members will need to sign into Yahoo! Mobile Internet on their wireless devices, click on the 'News' link, and then select 'My Headlines' to access their tailored source list.

Members will be able to access top headlines and snippets of articles--or the first 1,000 characters--as long as their phones are WAP 2.0-enabled. Over 60 percent of U.S. cell phone owners fall into this category, a Yahoo! spokeswoman estimated. Users on HTML-enabled "smart" phones can go a step further, linking directly to the source of articles to view original Web publishers' content.

Yahoo! currently offers a custom database of more than 250,000 sources on the Web that consumers can search, browse, and add to their My Yahoo! page to view through Yahoo! Mobile Internet. Also, users can add any of the countless Web publishers that currently offer RSS.

"Yahoo! will continue to extend its key services beyond the desktop," Gatz said, "providing an integrated PC-to-Mobile experience and helping consumers make the most of the mobile environment."

Recent mobile extensions of Yahoo! services include Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Photos, Yahoo! Search, and Yahoo! Games.