Google's online services, like those offered by Amazon, Microsoft, or any other company, sometimes fail. Hopefully, failures don't happen often. But when they do, it's helpful to have information about what's going on.The last significant Google Apps outage occurred in May, when about 14% of Gmail users experienced a service interruption. For a small subset of Google Apps users, there were also two brief Gmail outages in June.

Google launched its Apps Status Dashboard in February following a Gmail outage that month to provide more information to its business users. The Dashboard is certainly better way of providing service availability information than putting up a blog post somewhere. But users have to remember to visit the Dashboard Web site.

Now that minor inconvenience is no longer necessary. Google has launched an RSS feed for the Apps Status Dashboard. This allows users to subscribe to the feed using a variety of feed aggregation services like Google Reader, iGoogle, and the like.

"We know how much our users appreciate the transparency that the Apps Status Dashboard provides, and we hope the RSS feed enables them to get performance status information about the applications they care about in an efficient way," said Google engineer Tony Scelfo in a blog post.

It would of course be even more efficient to not have outages. But don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.