[LINK] "Yahoo Should Seize the Moment and Improve Its RSS Reader"

[rfmcdonald]

Facebook's Michael linked to this Mashable post suggesting that Yahoo could take advantage of Google Reader's imminent disappearance to upgrade its own, actually existing, RSS reader.

The big problem with this idea, as I see it, is that Yahoo isn't necessarily known for its subtle and ingenious responses to the market. I have a tag for Google, but nothing for Yahoo. I'd certainly be happy if a big-name search player supported RSS feeds, but counting on Yahoo may be a vain hope.

Google has lots of other profitable areas to focus on, so it's confident enough to ignore the pleas of users who are hooked on the search giant's news feed. Yahoo's in a different position. The number three search player is looking for reasons to draw users to its orbit Why not improve its RSS Reader?

Yahoo has an RSS reader under the "My Yahoo" banner, but it's in drastic need of an update. First of all, it looks like it's from 2003. Secondly, the newspaper-style format doesn't make any sense in the Twitter age. Yahoo believed at one time that you would like to see your news feed in source-based windows. Say you subscribed to feeds from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Instead of seeing those news organizations' latest headlines in real time, you see rectangles displaying their last five headlines. This ignores a truth of 2013 media consumption: Readers care less about the source than the headline. (In another anachronistic touch, Yahoo also includes the weather forecast prominently in the feed.)

The inspiration here is clearly portals, a bit of Internet architecture from the early 2000s that were based on the belief that Internet users craved a single page to visit each day where they could receive their daily data dump. Nowadays, we go to Facebook or Twitter for that or, for the next few months, to Google Reader.

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Yahoo could even add a little extra to the formula when it comes onboarding. As my colleague Lauren Indvik suggests, "Imagine if Yahoo had an 'Add to RSS' prompt you could hover over with a: 'What is this?' window to explain how you could keep track of multiple news sources, authors, topics, etc., all in one place." That would address those many readers for whom RSS remains a mystery. Google never put a lot of energy into explaining what RSS is and why a Reader is important, but Yahoo can flex its muscles as a consumer-friendly brand by introducing a whole new group of consumers to RSS.