Google Adds RSS Feed Option to News

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Google has reversed its initial snub of the RSS format, enabling users for the first time to add Really Simple Syndication feeds from Google News.

Google now offers either Atom 0.3 or RSS 2.0 as feed options—a choice that Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li calls an interesting one and likely a "nod to [Google's] ongoing support of the Atom standard," she wrote in her blog on Monday.

RSS and Atom provide a similar format for syndicating Web content in XML feeds to other sites and aggregation software called readers. The formats grew in popularity with the rise of blogging in recent years, but their rise has been marked by warring among the formats' relevant loyalists.

Dave Winer, a major RSS developer and backer, called for an end to the hostilities, suggesting that the two formats merge in an effort managed through a Web standards body such as the Internet Engineering Task Force.

"Can we put aside our differences now, and come up with a format that honors the work that's been done in the past and today and makes it possible for things to be better in the future, without the wasted energy that comes from disagreement and disrespect?" Winer asked in a blog posting in March 2004. Winer's suggestion came after Google in January 2004 decided to support Atom rather than RSS in its acquired Blogger Web logging software.

But now that Google has adopted RSS in both a test program for RSS advertising and in its news, Winer still isn't happy. (cont.)

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