"My Yahoo now has the ability to incorporate RSS Feeds. Its really easy to implement. Just click here to add the module (you may need to login first)

There are a few options available such as the amount of content displayed, and the display of headlines of older entries, etc. Here's what it looks like." [Library Stuff]

This is what My Yahoo should have been all along. They're learning that people don't want to be confined to content of the Yahoo's choosing. Instead, we want to be able to customize their content with our other favorites. Kudos to Yahoo for recognizing that we want to venture beyond their "walled gardens." Let's hope Sprint and the other cell carriers are taking copious notes.

Digital Imaging: The Camera Phone's Dirty Little Secret

"The camera phone has a dirty little secret: Most of the time, users can't exchange pictures the way that they do on TV commercials.

Despite the fact that 10 million camera phones are expected to ship by the end of this year, the communiqués featured on TV are actually only possible between people who use the same carrier.

And even then, the process doesn't quite work as advertised. Quite a few keypad clicks are required to see the photo sent. 'The thing that people want, where you send a picture and it pops up on someone else's screen, doesn't exist yet,' says IDC analyst Keith Waryas....

One would expect that carriers would be racing towards interoperability to boost sales, but so far there has mostly been foot-dragging. 'Carriers look at applications like this as a means of getting and keeping customers. They want customer to feel like they'll lose something if they switch providers.' says Waryas. The Enderle Group's Rob Enderle adds that carriers see establishing standards as enabling the competition.

This hesitation comes despite the fact that the wireless phone industry just witnessed a remarkable demonstration of the power of interoperability to drive data usage. For years the short-messaging services (SMS) that cell-phone providers introduced in the late 90s suffered from the same inability to work across carriers.

'We initiated SMS interoperability last fall on a Thursday without any public announcement,' says a Verizon spokesman, "By Friday the number of text messages traveling on our network had tripled," he says. A formal announcement was made the following week. For the industry as a whole, the number of SMS messages sent in 2002 doubled over 2001 according to IDC." [Forbes]