Google Reader was a fantastic way to keep up with your favorite blogs and news sources with RSS feeds, but it was discontinued years ago. Now, Google has remembered that RSS feeds still exist, but this is unfortunately not a return for Reader.
Google Chat is the company's primary messaging service, with the ability to send and receive messages to individuals or groups. It also has channel-based messaging, more like Discord, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. Chat replaced Google Hangouts in 2020 , but these days, it's mostly used by companies and other large organizations as a Slack alternative. Google is now rolling out a 'Feeds app' for Chat, which posts messages when there's a new item in an RSS or Atom feed.
The company said in a blog post, "This app makes it simple 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 group conversations and 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 type the /feedscommand to manage your subscriptions or add a new feed. When there's a new item from a subscribed feed, it appears as a new message in the chat. If it's a conversation in an organization's Google Chat, the administrator might need to allow the Feeds app first.
This is almost identical to Slack's RSS feed integration , and it's a great way to integrate updates and live news into a group chat you're frequently using. For example, if you have a group chat with friends about retro games, you could add the update feeds for your favorite emulators or retro hardware makers.
After Google Reader shut down in 2013, the company has only had a passing interest in supporting RSS as a technology. Google Play Newsstand was a partial replacement for Reader, allowing you to add RSS feeds alongside publications and digital magazines, but that eventually turned 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 that history, any new services built around RSS from Google seems notable, even in this case of a minor addition to a chat service that most people don’t use.
The Feeds app for Google Chat is available now for personal Google accounts, individual subscribers to Google Workspace, and Google Workspace users in organizations with Chat apps enabled. If you want an actual RSS reader, check out Inoreader (my personal favorite), Feedly , or The Old Reader .
Source: Google Workspace Updates
