Paul Bakaus teased this on JS Party #174, but the announcement landed even sooner than he said it would:

Chrome, at least in its experimental Canary version on Android (and only for users in the U.S.), is getting an interesting update in the coming weeks that brings back RSS, the once-popular format for getting updates from all the sites you love in Google Reader and similar services.

In Chrome, users will soon see a “Follow” feature for sites that support RSS and the browser’s New Tab page will get what is essentially a (very) basic RSS reader — I guess you could almost call it a “Google Reader.”

I sure do hope this is a small step on a longer journey to bring RSS (back) to the masses. It really is one of the web’s most virtuous technologies. Let’s not get too excited, though:

For now, though, this is only an experiment. Google says it wants to gather feedback from “publishers, bloggers, creators, and citizens of the open web” as it aims to build “deeper engagement between users and web publishers in Chrome.” Hopefully, it won’t stay this way.

My only question is: where can we spam submit this feedback that they’re after?!