Google I/O Chrome Follow session

Kevin Marks:

I'm going to tweet the Chrome RSS session

Shekhar Sharad:

when we talked to people, they cared about a lot of different publishers on the web and wanted ot be updated about all the content from them

from the publishers they want to build an audience and keep in touch with them.

we want to bring the follow functionality to the open web using standards in chrome

we want this on open standards such as rss, and make the least amount of work for web publishers, and other readers can take advantage of

we want this to be predictable via rss for which content to include, make follow/unfollow easy and opt out

Janice Wong:

as I follow a site the content will appear in a new follow section on the new tab page

there is a cog button to manage your follows and unfollow them

looks at blog whatsericplaying.com and clicks on follow, which redirects to the following tab (shows posts chrononologically)

[what's show are preview pages]

this will appear on Chrome android in USA in the next few weeks, then other countreis later

Nick Krasney:

what exactly is RSS? it's been around since 1990s and widely used. webmasters can publish RSS or Atom google will poll feeds for this

No RSS? No problem - we can build a feed from your content too, but it may be slower. Google will poll RSS often

use link rel="alternate" to specify a feed. You can opt out - it will show the follow button but won't generate a feed.

Yes we use WebSub at google to know when a feed is updated

Janice Wong:

notifications and feed updates are different options from a site

Nick Krasney:

the browser is not fetching RSS feeds, that's done server side

we support RSS and Atom now, we're interested in other feeds too, but tell us more

Janice Wong:

q: is it synced between browsers? yes, we will have this in prefs if you're logged in - we are looking at other platforms too

q: overlap with google news app? Not shared between them

Shekhar Sharad:

q: follow button embeddable eg navigator.follow? we would love to know more about this

Nick Krasney:

we can give some traffic info, but not who follows

Janice Wong:

if you follow a lot fo people it may get cluttered -we're looking at making this better

q: inbox folders, read count etc? No- we're not treating it as an inbox but a feed of content

Nick Krasney:

if you're a publisher make sure you update your RSS - please try in chrome canary on android and see us

follow us on twitter @WebCreators and discuss there

q: can I create an app that reads google's unified feed? not announced now, but what would be helpful?

Shekhar Sharad:

q: can this tab show in Google Discover? we're starting wiht Chrome and work with the open web

Kevin Marks:

is this the same mechanism as podcasts in google search?

Janice Wong:

we are not building from the same stack that follows podcasts, similar tech but not shared

q: will we get a notification when there's new? not a push, but the follow tab will be lit up

Shekhar Sharad:

q: do you have a previewer for publishers to see feed rendering in this? We don't but that is a good suggestion

Nick Krasney:

q: I write a feed reader - I'd like to import the users followed feeds from google - can we do that? we don't have that yet, but we're interested in what your dream API would look like

Shekhar Sharad:

q: can this not be tied to google's identity system? we want this to be available to all the open web - and we want to stick to that

Janice Wong:

if we want to make this for multiple clients we need to work out how to provide that experience as well

Nick Krasney:

q: is this connected to feedburner changes? No it's unrelated to that

Janice Wong:

to try this, go to play store on android and search for Chrome Canary -it's separate app from chrome to get access to early features. The experiment will be in that in a couple of week

Nick Krasney:

q: are you using Web Actions for the follow button? No, but we'll look at that too

we want to build out the next 20 years for RSS on the open web

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