Google says Chrome's Follow button, for sites that support RSS, is now available to all Android users
Google hasn't completely given up on RSS. Earlier this year, it started testing a Follow button in Chrome on Android, which allows users to get updates from websites on the new tab page.
Android Chrome users can follow RSS-enabled sites and receive their updates on the browser's New Tab page.
Publishers that maintain RSS feeds gain a direct discovery surface in Chrome without needing a separate app or notification integration.
Second-order effects
Publishers have a clearer incentive to keep RSS feeds current, while sites without usable feeds lose access to Chrome's Follow surface.
Google concentrates another content-discovery pathway inside Chrome, alongside the personalized feed it already operates on Android.
Third-order effects
If browser-integrated following gains sustained use, RSS can function less as a standalone reader protocol and more as infrastructure for discovery systems controlled by major browsers.
The pattern shifts the open-web trade-off from whether publishers can expose feeds to whether those feeds are meaningfully surfaced through dominant user interfaces.
The trend: Google is folding open-web publishing signals such as RSS into managed Android and Chrome discovery experiences.
Starting today, we're experimenting on Chrome stable with a Following feature. You can choose websites to follow, and their RSS updates will appear on Chrome's new tab page. We've been working on this for a while & I'm super excited to hear what people think 👇 https://twitter.com…
Why do I suspect that Google is bringing back some Google Reader functionality just so they can kill it again? https://twitter.com/... https://twitter.com/...
If you were to package this into web app, it could even be a standalone Google product. And you could workshop the name a bit, but maybe you could call it Google Read or something? https://twitter.com/...
So it is like Reader but grafted directly into your browser, like that poor monk in Lexx who had his head grafted into the brain of a planet-sized insect? https://twitter.com/...