Almost every fall during its 50 year lifetime, the Peanuts comic strip would run a variation of the Lucy and Charlie Brown football gag. The basis of the gag is that every year Lucy would talk Charlie Brown into trying to kick a football that she was holding and every year she would yank it away at the last second causing Charlie Brown to land on his butt.
Charles Schultz, who wrote the strip, died in 2000 but Google is apparently trying to keep the gag going. RSS users will undoubtedly recall Google’s abandonment of Google Reader, which powered most RSS readers. Google reportedly did this to drive acceptance of their new, since abandoned, social media platform that was so unsuccessful I’ve already forgotten its name. Google’s action was temporarily devastating to RSS. Many went so far as to declare it dead. But the thing is, unlike social media platforms, RSS solves a real problem so it bounced back with new readers that didn’t depend on Google.
Now Google is inviting RSS users to have another go at the football. They’ve announced that they’ve added an experimental feature to Chrome that is, in effect, an RSS reader. And you can trust them, they say: this time they won’t yank that football away. Before you become dependent on this new feature, you might want to ask Charlie Brown what he thinks.