Scott Gatz Keynote: All the ways Yahoo! is using RSS

Scott Gatz gave the lunch keynote today at Syndicate in San Francisco.  He went through Yahoo!'s range of products that are leveraging RSS in one way or another, positioning the company's activites as serving users whatever content they want, where and when they want it, however they want.

He demo'd the new Yahoo! Mail app, the RSS Alerts service, the integration of MediaRSS on My Yahoo!, the new podcast subscription manager, YPN ads in RSS feeds, etc.  Seeing the whole set of offerings strung together like that makes quite an impression.  

When I interviewed with Yahoo! back in July, I was told over and over again that the company had gone through the pain of embracing openness and that the products would tell the story.  I believed these people were being truthful, but it was hard to imagine how this was actually going to play out.  Seeing the powerpoint suddenly makes that feel very real.

Niall Kennedy asked a question about publisher services and how Yahoo! plans to share with content creators what data we're able to see happening around all these products.  There are several ways the company is exposing that data, but we could clearly do more here.  Enabling content creators to leverage Yahoo! as a distribution channel is one thing, but supporting their needs to make a business out of doing that is something totally different.  It's a good question, and I would love to see Yahoo! really focus on this.

Kevin Burton asked about public APIs.  Scott pointed him to developer.yahoo.net where the current APIs are posted and some community efforts to help facilitate more activity.  He said, Yahoo! is still testing some concepts, and the company knows that this is incredibly important.  And Scott said we can expect to see a lot more in that area.

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