"Google Reader is no longer available. To continue receiving Google Alerts, change to email delivery."
Apparently the only reason for Google to support RSS was that they had their own RSS aggregator.
Classy move.
we encourage providers of feed systems and related tools to connect their
automated systems for feed acquisition to our PuSH hub (or other hubs in the
PuSH ecosystem).
Google directly hosts many feed producers (e.g. Blogger is one of the largest
feed sources on the web) and is a feed consumer too (e.g. many webmasters use
feeds to tell our Search system about changes on their sites). Our PuSH hub
offers easy access to hundreds of millions of Google-hosted feeds, as well as
hundreds of millions of other feeds available via the PuSH ecosystem and
through active polling.