Yahoo tying RSS into its social media services

Last week at the Syndicate conference I interviewed Scott Gatz, Yahoo senior director of personalization products, which includes the RSS everywhere that makes sense across Yahoo properties strategy. In the

The next phase of Yahoo's RSS effort is looking for more ways to use tagging and search services, such as a blog search engine, to provide increased relevance in feeds. Yahoo is also wiring up various services (360, Web 2.0, Flickr, del.icio.us, upcoming.org, etc.) with 2 million feeds and other content on Yahoo into what Gatz called "social media," enriched by users creating their own content. I asked Gatz just how permeable Yahoo's walled garden will be, in terms of making it easy for those users to interoperate with external services and own their data and settings. 

He wasn't forthcoming about when the new AJAXed Yahoo Mail, which has a strong resemblance to Microsoft Outlook mail (guess why), would be released to the estimated 225 million users.