Well, Pamela, your wish was answered really fast…Yahoo didn’t buy Bloglines, but it bought something similar: Oddpost. No financial details were released. The nifty little tool provides Web-based e-mail and RSS newsreader built into one.

Dave Winer has a good explanation of the value Oddpost has: “Oddpost turned the idea of what you could do with a browser upside down, by producing a clone of Microsoft Outlook in JavaScript and DHTML running in MSIE. Since then, they have labored in relative obscurity, growing a customer base, raising VC money, adding people, and staying out of the way. Then Google launches Gmail, with a very Oddpostish interface, and someone at Yahoo says ‘Hmmm, I’ve seen that somewhere,’ calls up Ethan and Iain and their new VCs and asks ‘Are you for sale?’”

The company got some venture funding from Venture Strategy Partners and Draper Associates a few months before.

Quick take: Well, Oddpost is similar to what MyYahoo does, to some extent, and Oddpost would be combined with that as well as Yahoo e-mail product. The idea is to make MyYahoo as the communication and newsreading hub, and Oddpost combines it in an elegant way that Yahoo has struggled with till now.

Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Oddpost’s own announcement keeps it simple: “We’ll be working on a new, advanced Yahoo! Mail product…After the migration, you’ll get an additional free year of premium Yahoo! Mail service including two gigs of storage, SpamGuard Plus, advanced virus protection and lots of other goodies.”

For more on RSS business models and funding, issues etc, read our dedicated RSS section...