RSS-aggregators haven't achieved the general breakthrough some of us might have hoped they would. Jeremy Zawodny writes about the latest developments over at My Yahoo, summing up the current state of play thus: 'Yahoo is in a unique position to ... bring RSS to the masses. ... My Yahoo has adapted to handle RSS/Atom feeds in addition to all the other content that was previously available'.
Some folks might argue that the world just needs to learn about RSS, download and use a desktop aggregator, and so on. That's true for some people, but probably not the majority. My parents, for example, don't care about the various technologies that make their e-mail work. They just want e-mail. They don't know about HTML either. They just want to use the web.So this new version of My Yahoo tries to get us closer to the point that it Just Works. To make content discovery easier, there are multiple ways to find feeds: search, a small directory, a list of popular feeds, and even some editor's picks. ...
If you're already using a desktop aggregator and like all the features it provides, I don't expect you'll switch. You're an advanced user. You probably don't realize it, but you are. There's part of the population that does all of their e-mail using web-based mail services only. To others, that seems insane. The same will likely be true of web-based vs. desktop-based aggregators.
(How does this differ from Bloglines? 'My Yahoo isn't simply an RSS aggregator. It's still about pulling together lots of information into a single place. And not all of that information is available via RSS.')
