Yahoo launched a new RSS feed alert service, allowing users to receive RSS feed alerts via email, instant message or SMS message - and the system is integrated with the new Yahoo Mail beta, the first RSS offering within a major web-based email system, writes CNET. Within a week or so, publishers will be able to place a button on their sites to allow people to subscribe to feeds and receive them in their Yahoo services.

More and more, RSS is being used as a channel for online advertising, which accounts for most of Yahoo's profits.

Within the new Yahoo Mail, users can read the alerts in an email folder when they check their email, and can archive them and forward them.

Creating an email folder for RSS was a logical way to educate more people about RSS, because email is the most popular application online, Scott Gatz, Yahoo's senior director of personalization products, told the Associate Press. "This is really taking RSS to another level."