About feed protocols

RSS and co. are here to stay.

I'm a huge fan of RSS to receive updates about my favourite news sites. Things like he guardian, various italian newspapers, the register, let you download an XML RSS feed to keep track of what's going on during the day.

Now, google, decided it's high time to remake RSS, but different.

Google's "Feed"

Of course, google dosn't like the classic, distributed way of doing feed syndication and the basic reason is that if you have a feed, in a separate feed reader application, visits to the websites that serves google ads goes down, hurting their money-making machine.

I'm not surprised by the fact that Google see RSS as a threat. In the end, what makes Google, well.... Google, is the fact that you spend more time on the WWW, not that you spend more time on the internet. Even if RSS is not that popular anymore, it has a series of properties that can be a real threat to the whole advertisement business model:

It's easy to generate, even for a small, custom website.

It's federated. Somebody to see your updated just needs to "pull" a new RSS feed file.

It's complete. Potentially, you do not need to leave your feed reader to read the content.

Let's take, for example, this very gemini capsule. With a small amount of m4 templating and a shell script, I can generate an atom feed for any directory containing files with at least one link in a specific form. Anybody then, just attach to the specific feed and can receive news about what I publish without the need to visit the website.

You can make the experience complete, by adding in the "description" tag, the whole content of the gemlog or blog entry. This way your users will never need to open a browser to consume your content. It's easy to understand why Google wants to EEE the RSS/feeds world, isn't it? Less websites visits means less ads views and in turn means less ads clicks.

In 2021, Google had total revenues of $256.73USD billions, with ads being 81% of that amount.

Statista

What's the new Google Chrome "feed" feature?

It's essentially a closed and privatized version of RSS, meant to be totally used by it's users from Chrome itself. You have a bar in the browser, where you can be notified of updates coming from the various web sites (what google calls "follow"). The point of all of this is for google, to be able to track your "visits", including your visualization of the bookmarks and websites, in order to monetize and scrap the data that your visit came from their feed ecosystem.

Of course, a normal website can do the same thing with their RSS feeds, adding a parameter to the final URL is more than enough for analytics purposes, but this doesn't let an entity like Google to track your web experience to the extent as they would like.

And RSS is a real threat to that.

Google needs you to be IN THE BROWSER, to be able to track, monetize and tailor the web experience you will see, to the advantage of their customers (the advertisers), and anything keeping you out of the web, is a threat to their model.

By the way, I built a feed fetching tool, to let you read your favourite feeds from your mail client:

Rssgoemail

It's inspired by rss2email, still in alpha stage, but it works already. Somebody asked me if I could add support for the gemfeed format. That's going to land soon.