Google made a new RSS reader, but it’s not Google Reader
Google Reader was a fantastic way to follow your favorite blogs and news sources with RSS feeds, but it was discontinued years ago. Now, Google has reminded that RSS feeds still exist, but this is unfortunately not a return for Reader.
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Google Chat is the company’s primary messaging service, with the ability to send and receive messages to individuals or groups. It also offers channel-based messaging, more like Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Chat replaced Google Hangouts in 2020, but these days it’s mostly used by businesses and other large organizations as an alternative to Slack. Google is currently rolling out a “Feeds app” for Chat, which posts messages when there is a new item in an RSS or Atom feed.
The company said in a blog post: “This app makes it easy for teams to bring important real-time external updates, such as news, blog posts, and industry research from any Atom or RSS feed, directly into their conversations and group spaces. The goal is to eliminate the need for context switching to monitor external information sources.
If you have a channel (or “space”) in Google Chat, you can enter the /flow command to manage your subscriptions or add a new feed. When a new item comes from a feed you’re subscribed to, it appears as a new message in chat. If this is a conversation in an organization’s Google Chat, the admin may need to authorize the Feeds app first.
This is almost identical to Slack’s RSS feed integration and is a great way to integrate live updates and news into a group chat you use frequently. For example, if you’re group chatting with friends about retro games, you can add update feeds from your favorite emulators or retro hardware makers.
After Google Reader shut down in 2013, the company had only passing interest in supporting RSS technology. Google Play Newsstand was a partial replacement for Reader, allowing you to add RSS feeds alongside digital publications and magazines, but this eventually morphed into Google News and dropped direct RSS support. You could also subscribe to RSS feeds with Chrome for Android at one point, but that was later removed as well. Given this history, any new service built around Google’s RSS seems remarkable, even as a minor addition to a chat service that most people don’t use.
The Feeds app for Google Chat is now available for personal Google accounts, individual Google Workspace subscribers, and Google Workspace users in organizations with Chat apps enabled. If you want a real RSS reader, check out Inoreader (my favorite), Feedly, or The Old Reader.
Source: Google Workspace updates
