7 mo. ago • 95%

How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds

openrss.org How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds

Learn how one of the biggest tech companies played a major role in the reason many people stopped using RSS feeds

25 comments

But it's clear that Google has a history of building products with RSS and killing the RSS support once it's established a user base.

Not only RSS. It was the same with XMPP, and probably other things I don't remember now. Better don't rely on Google products.

41
- cough cough gmail
  
  ~~(I use gmail and need to stop)~~
  
  4
  
  What gmail do? Except the usual data tomfoolery
  
  2
I will say I just found the RSS feeds for News, like as of 2 days ago.

24
- Care to share it? :)
  
  6
  
  https://news.google.com/rss
  
  https://www.aakashweb.com/articles/google-news-rss-feed-url/
  
  9
  
  https://news.google.com/rss will redirect to a feed for the top content in your region.
  
  You can also make a search and paste that URL into your feed reader and it will find the feed to subscribe to that search.
  
  2
- you could always write a scraper but javascript makes this a non-trivial task
  
  3
  
  Just import a headless web browser into your scraper, of course! Couldn't be easier 🙄
  
  4
The browser had a built-in RSS button that would display in the browser location bar when any website you're on had an RSS feed available. Clicking the button would then take you to the RSS feed for that web page

How would this work? Do websites with rss feeds normally publish the url to that feed in some standard place? Are there any third party extensions that do it?

11
- How would this work? Do websites with rss feeds normally publish the url to that feed in some standard place?
  
  feeds are usually advertised in the page header as below, with type set to either application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml.
  
  <head> <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Example Feed" href="https://example.com/feed/" /> </head>
  
  Are there any third party extensions that do it?
  
  i don't know about chrom[e|ium], but i use Awesome RSS for firefox.
  
  35
  
  How did I not know websites did this. Here I was always trying to guess the urls a few times before giving up lol. Today I learned...
  
  Thanks for the extension suggestion too!
  
  12
  
  That's perfect since I use FF anyway, thanks
  
  9
- I believe there is a standard <meta> tag for an RSS feed
  
  10
- Also, some (most?) RSS readers don't need the path to the feed directly. You give them the regular URL and they'll figure it out. TinyTinyRSS does it.
  
  7
- Yes, they do. In no particular order:
  
  Do a View Source on the site's frontpage. You might see some HTML for "application/atom+xml" or "application/rss+xml". The URLs associated with those hrefs will be for the ATOM and RSS feeds.
  
  If you search for one of the following in the HTML source you'll probably run into the feeds:
  
  rss
  
  atom
  
  feed
  
  json
  
  Look for a syndication page on the site. It should have links to the feeds.
  
  You might see the RSS feed icon or the ATOM feed icon on the page.
  
  Many CMSes (Wordpress in particular) automatically put them at /feed on the site.
  
  3
Business as usual at Google.

6
Google is a fucking nightmare. I‘m not gonna cite the article but damn they employed every dirty trick in the book it seems. The more I learn about EEE the more it disgusts me. All in the name of manipulation, monopoly and money.

4
E.E.E.

4
They did the same with Flash with the help of adobe.

2
i found some info (via gemini)

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