The Importance of RSS

unfoldedorigami writes "Kevin Hale of Particletree wrote an interesting essay about the importance of RSS and speculates that the success of social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and Technorati has got Google worried about subscribe becoming the new search. Hale thinks this is the reason behind why they've become so interested in feed reading and the procurement of revenue from them."

Comments

Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader

[jason718]

Something like Bloglines? (now owned by AskJeeves)

Re:Web-based RSS Feed Reader

[Jugalator]

Imagine this - if Google could provide a good UI and simple but feature rich interface, I could log onto the equivalent of Google FeedReader and add my feeds there.

I think Google Fusion is going to do this "soon".

From the FAQ, bolding in reply mine:

11. Can I add other news sources or feeds?

Not yet, but stay tuned. We chose the currently available feeds for this beta release of personalized homepages in order to give a good sampling of content from across the web. Right now you can choose from among leading U.S. news feeds, international news feeds, technology feeds, and non-tech/non-news feeds. As we continue to improve this feature, we envision enabling users to add almost any standardized feed to your personalized homepage.

With "standardized feed" I assume they mean feeds following the RSS and/or Atom standards.

Anyway, in this case, you'd have your RSS feeds on your main Google search page if using this feature.