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Tech Report: Google Revives RSS Feed

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS)— Google touched off a firestorm last week when it announced its Reader service was ending. At the same time, the company deleted the RSS button from its Chrome browser leading some to call the move the death of the RSS feed.

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary, has been a way of directing blog posts, as well as other content, toward us.

The company re-installed the browser extension on Tuesday, saying its removal had been a mistake, but it does raise the question about the life-span of Google services.

The company goes through a spring cleaning from time to time, but what if you're one of the people who use a service it deems not good enough? I use Google Voice, in fact when people call me they call my Google Voice number, it's the only number I give out. I don't think Google is going to shutter Voice, but if they did I'd be in serious trouble.

Google Revives RSS Feed

Something like 500,000 signed a protest where change.org got involved. These were likely people who depend on Google services. Google maintains that Google Reader is less popular than it used to be. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people still want to use it.

It could be a situation where they're renaming it like where Google Buzz became Google+. Some other Google services that have gone by the wayside include Google Health and Google 411. So they have been known to throw things against the wall to see what sticks. Some succeed , some of them fail.

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