Going Wayback to My Netscape
posted by DL Byron on September 29, 2004
My Yahoo with RSS is another good step in the progress to making RSS suck less. While reading the copy, "You don't have to visit each site individually because the headlines or brief summaries are delivered right to you," I realized we'd gone wayback to My Netscape and the channel metaphor. Not that customizing channels is a bad thing, I wrote about that in part in the, "What Productivity Gains with RSS," post and Glassdog posted a similar topic with, "What's Wrong With: Feed Readers." I just noticed that it took us 6 years to go back to where RSS started with Netscape.
The internet archive cache shows Dec 12, 1998 as the earliest incarnation of My Netscape and the History of RSS shows it being developed for Netscape in March 15, 1999. Then in 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support. Today, My Yahoo brings it back.
Damn, what's old is new again. I remember developing channels, webtop, and the active desktop. There's even a Textura Design sidebar out there for Netscape 6.0.
The difference now, as noted by Jeremy Zawodny's blog, is that Yahoo is taking RSS to the people and making it easy for their users, publishers, and bloggers.
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