Yahoo Launches Another Site Without RSS

Yahoo's romance with RSS continues to be off. Yahoo Food, Yahoo Advertising, Yahoo TV and now Yahoo Personal Finance. None of them has feeds.

Comments

[Ed]

Interesting. Maybe they're basing it on what the folks at Hitwise (LeeAnn Prescott) wrote about concerning the web readers? But that only applies to that, RSS web readers.

I can't see how RSS won't take off. Yes, I'm still amazed at the low numbers. But, it will take off. Overtime people will see that they need RSS to get a glance and quickly determine what they need to see.

Yahoo discontinuing RSS almost seems similar to AOL's insisting on dial-up customers. Overtime, people "graduate" and move on to the better technology.

Interesting to see this 1998 article on BusinessWeek on portals.
http://www.businessweek.com/1998/36/b3594011.htm

All the "portals" cared about was pageviews. Yahoo still may think that way, but that's changing. Check out this Alexa analysis for those portals.

http://snipurl.com/alexaportals

All declining (except for Snap, likely b/c of Snap Preview), Yahoo steady. But look at the "pageviews" for Yahoo. Going down. Also, look on the bottom and you'll see that ~50% of users use Yahoo for the free Webmail. I'm sure that if they offered POP access for free (as Google does) that their pageviews would drop drastically.

Now they're attempting this for the "pageviews".

[Sal Cangeloso]

I noticed this when I visited Yahoo Finance this morning. What a disappointment. I will still visit the site, but without RSS I definitely won't keep nearly as close an eye on it. Personally I am a SeekingAlpha fan and I thought this would be a good supplement to that but it is way too much information to parse without RSS.

[Ted Drake]

RSS feeds are available for bloggers on Personal Finance.
http://finance.yahoo.com/expert/index

[Louis Gray]

It would certainly be interesting to compile a Top 10 or Top 25 Web sites that beg for an RSS feed, and don't yet have one.

Whether you like the guy or not, The Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com) would be an obvious candidate, as would TV Tattle (www.tvtattle.com).

I would read both sites a great deal more if they fed into my Google Reader.

[Stuart]

"I can't see how RSS won't take off. Yes, I'm still amazed at the low numbers. But, it will take off. Overtime people will see that they need RSS to get a glance and quickly determine what they need to see."

I wonder if that really is so.

It certainly is for tech-savvy people and those who work on the Net but I don't see that trend with people who are not online all day every day.

I still see a huge number of people (ordinary mums and dads and business people alike) who haven no idea what RSS is and are unlikely to see how it can help them even when it is explained to them.

Heck one of my sites still gets a load of hits from people who reach the site by typing the entire URL into Google.

[kenji mori]

RSS is about decentralization of media, with which the traditional mass marketing discipline would not blend immediately. Notably yahoo and many others (Yes, "mass marketing" I would say their discipline is.)

[chigdon]

MeeVee.com has customizeable RSS feeds for tracking your favorite shows.

[Mark Harrison]

RSS, or something strangely similar, will take off with acceptance by the user and with the advent of a popular reader. I think people still see it as a little too "techy". Regardless, Yahoo is attempting to control access to content, which is counter to a basic axiom of the Internet.

[Mousefinger]

Maybe Yahoo! is waiting for something better. RSS Feeds are hideously primitive. Plus, does EVERY site *need* RSS feeds?

I mean, I like my cigar too, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while.

[Christine More]

Yahoo Personal Finance has feeds for its expert bloggers, and Yahoo Food has a feed for the recipe of the day, as well as feeds for its own bevy of bloggers. Sure you have to look past the main page to find most of these, but I'd hardly call that turning their back on RSS.

[Eric Rice]

Ahahahahaah Mousefinger, that comment won this thread!

What if content is such that people don't subscribe absolutely, and take a more a la carte approach? After all, I might tune into say, Home & Garden Television and watch a particular episode on a design show. We tend to have favorite TV shows, but might catch a documentary on a topic that interests us. Look at PBS or NPR shows. Do we watch each and every single episode regardless?

I'm starting to find that while I subscribe to about 200 blogs through my RSS reader, I'm not fully reading the blogs, simply because I have no interest or the headline is good enough.

For example, I haven't and probably won't read Steve's post on Wikipedia taking steps to prevent vandalism, because well, that's all I need to know and don't really care about it personally.

Are we tricking ourselves with our RSS beliefs or do we really hang on each and every word that we utter? I'm thinkin the former, but mileage varies, heh.