Online superstore Amazon.com is rolling out hundreds of
customized RSS feeds for use by e-commerce shoppers, a move that gives a big thumbs-up to the growth of the RSS content syndication format.
Amazon.com’s embrace of RSS
support from Yahoo and is seen as a big boost for consumer adoption of news
aggregators. RSS (Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary) is an
XML-based technology used to push content to news aggregators.
For the most part, RSS usage has been limited to techies and early
adopters for the availability of feeds on high-traffic consumers sites like
Amazon.com and Yahoo .
In addition to making Yahoo News available via RSS feeds, the mega portal
has also rolled out a new search engine technology that returns
available RSS feeds within search results and integrates those results
with its ‘My Yahoo’ news aggregator.
Amazon.com’s RSS feeds have been programmed to deliver content by categories,
subcategories and search results from its Web site. The company said the
feeds would deliver a headline-view of the top 10 bestsellers in specific
categories or set of search results.
Categories include books, music, DVDs/videos, electronics, toys and
magazines.
The company’s adoption of RSS is powered by Amazon Web Services,
which was released in
2002 to give third party developers access to its database via XML and
SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) standards.