Yahoo Inc. on Thursday launched a service that allows mobile phone users to access news and other information either from the portal's personalized news and information service or from websites that offer RSS content syndication.

The new service extends the Sunnyvale, Calif., company's My Yahoo desktop service to mobile devices, which the company has targeted as a growth area for its Internet services. In addition, users can access content from websites that the support really simple syndication, or RSS, a lightweight format based on extensible markup language that's designed for sharing headlines and other Web content, such as weblogs.

"More people read RSS feeds through My Yahoo! than through any other RSS news reader and we are excited to extend personalized RSS beyond the desktop and into the mobile environment," Scott Gatz, senior director of personalization products for Yahoo, said in a statement.

To access content on the My Yahoo desktop service, cellular-phone users would first sign into the Yahoo Mobile Internet service, click on the news link and select "My Headlines" to access all of the news sources they have set up on their computer. Depending on the type of handset, users will be able to read both top headlines and a snippet of each article, or the entire article.

Yahoo currently offers a custom database of 250,000 sources of information from across the web that consumers can search and add to their My Yahoo page and view through the Yahoo Mobile Internet. My Yahoo also can provide headlines and article summaries from any RSS-supported website, as well as from blogs supporting the newer Atom standard for content syndication.

In other portal news, Google Inc. late Wednesday launched personalization features for its news page. Users can now rearrange categories on the page, and chose the country from which they want general news or news on science/technology, entertainment, sports or health. Users can also set up their own custom categories.