"In other email platforms, as I've mentioned before I think once Yahoo Mail Beta goes live (probably sometime in 2007) then RSS will reach another huge user base. Yahoo Mail has 250M + users and RSS is integrated within the mail inbox in Yahoo Mail Beta, enabling you to check your favorite RSS feeds at the same time as checking your email. It's no accident Yahoo chose to implement RSS in the inbox - everybody uses email, so by adding RSS into the mix Yahoo is making it easy for mainstream people to adopt RSS reading as a daily habit.
The same I think will apply to Google, once (if?) they implement RSS reading into Gmail. They've already started down that path by re-designing Google Reader to mimic the Gmail interface.
As a sidenote, I'll also be following closely what Google does with GData and Google Base, which both use RSS and its variant Atom.
The Widget Factor
Finally, MySpace really does hold most of the cards in the developing widget war - because it is the biggest platform by far for widgets, not counting the mass populace of independent blogs (which only compares to MySpace numbers in aggregate). A lot of widgets are powered by RSS, or a variant of it. So MySpace is going to be one of the key RSS platforms in 2007 - and how they manage this platform will be keenly watched.
Any way you look at it, 2007 is shaping up to be a BIG year for RSS!"
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