Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 10:20 AM
Nearly every iGoogle user has an RSS feed or two on their homepage - from top news to celebrity gossip, recipes, and much much more. In true Google fashion, we originally launched RSS support with a simple headline-only presentation. However, we all know the power of pictures, and so, we're happy to announce the addition of image support to our standard RSS gadget.With this new feature, users have three different display views.
Headline only
SlideshowHeadline and lead story
When users go to iGoogle today, they’ll notice that not all feeds have the same view. We default each feed to what we believe is the optimal display based on the images currently available in the feed. Of course, users can change the display setting by choosing "edit settings" in the drop down menu for each feed.
These new views not only create a better experience for users, but also give publishers an opportunity to more easily expose rich content, often already present in their RSS feeds. To take advantage of this new feature, publishers simply need to add images and associated Media RSS and/or enclosure elements to their existing RSS feeds. We’ll then grab the images, resize them down as necessary, and provide hosting/caching. Additionally, we’ll make the images clickable and display a 150 character snippet in the “Headline and lead story” view.
Here are a sampling of feeds to try out:
- CNN
- NYTimes
- BBC
- The Economist
- Time.com
- People Magazine
- Entertainment Weekly
- Wikihow
- National Geographic (try it in slideshow mode)
- Simply Recipes (try it in slideshow mode)
This feature is launching in the US over the next day with full international support coming soon. Please see our feed publisher instructions for more information.
