Thursday, February 04, 2016

Google and RSS: Not unfolding as anticipated

Google Reader died just 3 years ago. It feels a lot longer, I’m probably thinking of when Google burned Reader Social in favor of their G+ initiative. That was 5 years ago; eons by our reckoning, but things have changed less than we expected.

2013 was a truly bad year, but then Google ran into some G+ problems. Namely we hated it. They’ve since cut G+ into pieces, burned each piece, and scattered the ashes deep beneath the continental plates.

Meanwhile, despite a Feed 101 page that’s unchanged since 2004, Google’s Feedburner still lives. Google’s ancient Blogger Buzz blog is active, indeed blogs continue to be Google’s primary way of talking to the world.

Consider Google Fiber — one of their most critical projects. Today’s public housing announcement has a blogspot.com URL. More — take a look at the sidebar:

 Screen Shot 2016 02 04 at 9 58 43 AM

Ok, so it still has the obsolete G+ link, and Twitter and Facebook get colorful links, but note the old “Feed” link. Still there.

That’s not what we expected three years ago.

There’s more. Gmail has 1 billion active accounts. That’s big, but Google wants to replace it with Inbox. So Inbox is a good guide to Google’s current thinking. Inbox has an RSS (Atom) Feed.

RSS survived the great fire of 2013Media gurus are shocked to learn that RSS still rules the news. RSS is still the only standard for two essential net functions: notification and subscription. RSS is going to last (Feedbin and Reeder.app are my personal clients).

I wonder when Google will incorporate Feed subscription into Inbox.

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