That’s the real value-add of RSS: it not only brings your favorite websites together in one platform but highlights the latest news as soon as it’s published.

Within an RSS reader’s interface, you enter the URL of a website you’d like to “follow.” If the site publishes an XML feed of its pages (more on that in a moment), the reader will start to pull in the page titles and descriptions in a kind of news feed.Īs your saved sites publish new content, the reader will immediately update. And that pretty much sums up what they do and how easy they are to use. RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. So what happened - and are RSS readers still relevant today? RSS readers: a minimal tool for viewing web articles Reader was “successful and growing” in 2013, a recent Y Combinator thread points out. The shutdown wasn’t about maximizing profit or a declining user base.

The reactions to Google’s move were less than positive: That’s the day Google switched off its Google Reader tool - a slick, intuitive web interface for collating and favoriting web content.

Google rss feed reader