It’s a long time since Google Reader was a live product and the misery of its fans can be felt to this day, but Google I/O has brought an unexpected ray of hope for the long-missed RSS aggregator that could result in users being able to “Follow” websites in the Chrome browser similar to how you follow them on Twitter.
The Chromium Blog has unveiled an upcoming experiment for Chrome Canary where Android users will see a “Follow” option in the Chrome browser menu that will show new content as a feed in the New Tab without the need to install a separate app.
“Keeping a site’s RSS up-to-date will ensure Chrome can provide the latest content to users with this experiment. We will provide more guidance to web publishers as we learn and evaluate whether this feature will graduate from an experiment to a broader rollout in Chrome.”
There are a number of unanswered questions such as will the “Follow” function make it past the experimental stage, will it allow for the synchronization of “Follows” between mobile and desktop? If it was to be added to the stable Chrome channel, would it be something you’d use?
