An RSS feed is a form that is available online which consists of all the files that the website has ever issued or circulated. It helps one stay updated with current affairs, news, gather sources, and much more. It stands for Really Simple Syndication. Whenever content is created/posted online, each particular of the content like the author name, date of publication, summary, full-text, etc. are robotically communicated to and saved in a file in sequential order. You can make use of RSS feeds to keep well-run with every portion of content that your saved pages have published or in receiving and distributing newsletters. These feeds are coded and in the layout of XML and so to convert these RSS feeds into readable content you require an RSS reader. An RSS reader converts these codes to the content that you see on the website which makes it understandable to a layman.
You can subscribe to blogs and channels on RSS reader and then when you log in you can see what are the new contents that have been published by your subscribed channels since you last logged in. This feature suddenly was announced to be stopped altogether effective July 1st, 2013. However, a maximum number of users were disappointed and then started the ‘bring back RSS’ movement on Twitter recently. Lack of usage and awareness of this feature was stated as the reason for the shutting down of this feature.
At the start of this year, Google published news of rediscovering RSS. Well, it isn’t Google reader exactly but then it could go somewhere in a similar direction. It was tested with their Android users of incorporating a “follow” sites option on Chrome browser. This feature is said to be based on the idea taken from the RSS concept. The test was done is a small scale among the Chrome Users of the US. Users just had to browse sites on Chrome browser and had the option to follow the channel or blog from the browser itself. This was tested on the canary version back in May but today it has passed the first test phase, is being released to the stable versions of Chrome.
When you open the app you will be able to see three dots at the top left of the screen and then follow the RSS feed and subscribe to it from there. The sites that you follow or subscribe to will appear in a definite section of the google menu that is called “following” and the new content from these sites will be under the section “for you’. This is still only limited to Android phones and is yet to be introduced among iOS users.
This feature is not available to all but you can certainly curate your Chrome for this functionality to be enabled in your Android. You need to visit chrome://flags and then activate it under web feed. Remember this is only a mobile version and is yet to be introduced to the desktop versions.
