(disclaimer: I just bought a tiny bit of Yahoo stock)

I know I’m not the first to say this, but I think Yahoo is moving forward with some cool new ideas that I think will end up making them money. They’re one of the few big companies that get the future of syndicated content (RSS or Atom, for example). Take their new Yahoo 360 service. Among all the usual features you’d expect from a thing like Orkut or Friendster, they have this little announcement:

Coming soon…

You’ll be able to share your RSS-enabled content (blogs, photos, etc.) in Yahoo! 360°.

What I think this means is that soon, I’ll be able to have my 360 page display posts from FatMixx, my photos from Flickr, and my bookmarks from del.icio.us. That’s pretty cool.

It’s even more cool when you think about what they’re doing with 360 and My Yahoo. They’re going to be able to bring together all of this different content that they don’t have to worry about creating directly. That’s a good plan for them, because they don’t have to worry about the tools to manage your photos (though they did buy Flickr), don’t necessarily have to force people to use their blogging software, and generally can just take advantage of the fact that people go there for a lot of other things. It’s nice being a portal.

The one thing I’m reading into the presentation of 360 is that perhaps they’ll have specialized display elements for different types of data. It’s all RSS, but an RSS feed that’s just photos is different from an RSS feed with comics strips even though both contain images. It would be nice if they could provide little widgets that focused on a particular set of tasks. Little details, like sorting or persistence behavior would need to be different so it might not be that complicated to build. That would be a nice touch.