Yahoo Inc. has gone live with its upgrade of its personalized home page service that focuses on aggregating news feeds.
The Sunnyvale, Calif., company made its revamped My Yahoo generally available on Friday after a two-month beta test.
New My Yahoo users will automatically receive the updated service, while existing users will be asked to move over to the upgrade over the course of the next few weeks, said Scott Gatz, Yahoos senior director of personalization products.
/zimages/1/28571.gifClick hereto read more about My Yahoos RSS efforts.
The centerpiece of the new My Yahoo is a further embrace of XML syndication to centrally store content from Weblogs and other Web sites within users personalized pages. My Yahoo supports both the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom formats, which are commonly used among bloggers and news sites.
“Were confident that we have a much better product,” Gatz said of the update. “We fixed issues along the way, and the quality of the product is where it needs to be.”
Since launching the beta, Yahoo has doubled the number of searchable feeds to 300,000, Gatz said. Users also can subscribe to any feed by entering its URL and by browsing a directory of feeds that Yahoo editors maintain.
/zimages/1/28571.gifWhat about RSS ads?Click hereto read more about plans from Yahoos Overture division.
My Yahoo has about 20 million users, and Gatz said that millions chose to switch to the beta of the upgraded service. He declined to specify what proportion of users has made the switch.
Also during the beta, Yahoo fixed a series of bugs and improved My Yahoos Web compatibility with the Firefox 1.0 Web browser, Gatz said.
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