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There has been a lot of talk lately about Google vs. Yahoo!, and I can see why. Since Yahoo! launched their Research Labs, they have released the Yahoo! 360 blogging/photo/etc. site and today they released a beta of the new Yahoo! News site.

BTW, if you haven’t had a chance to check out Yahoo! 360, I have about 100 invites to give out, so leave your name in the comments and I will send one your way.

Let’s talk about 360 first. I have had an account there for a few weeks now and have played around with it. It seems to be a big social networking tool, allowing you to connect with other people who have 360 accounts, receiving messages from them, seeing their lists of favorites and stuff like that. The service seems solid, but could use some improvement. For one thing, it would be great if you could pull your Yahoo! mail into your 360 panel. There is a mailbox, but it seems to only pull messages from your 360 friends.

In addition to providing a blog, Yahoo!360 allows you to share photos and music, as well as local reviews and lists of favorites. Since this is just a beta, maybe they will allow you to incorporate your Flickr photos into the site, instead of using the Yahoo! Photos service.

As for the new Yahoo!News beta, it is a pretty slick piece of work. In addition to pulling news from preset sources like the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and Reuters. Fairly similar to Google News, but seems like not as many sources as Google. The thing that seperates Yahoo! from Google here is the ability to add you own sources from a fairly extensive list of media outlets offering RSS feeds of their content. You can even create custom RSS feeds of any subject you search for.

I think one of the major differences between Google and Yahoo has been Yahoo’s willingness to embrace RSS. Sure, Gmail gives you a feed for your Inbox, but it is hard to find anything at Yahoo that you can’t subscribe to via RSS.