FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a web feed management provider launched in 2004. FeedBurner was founded by Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. Costolo, a University of Michigan graduate, who became CEO of Twitter in 2010. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers.

Services[]

Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format, authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner's feeds. Users can find out how many people have subscribed to their feeds and with what service/program they subscribed.

Published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, and "splicing" information from multiple feeds. FeedBurner is a typical Web 2.0 service, providing web service application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it. As of October 5, 2007, FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers, including 142,534 podcast and videocast feeds.

History[]

On June 3, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google Inc., for a rumored price of $100 million. One month later, two of their popular "Pro" services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to all users.

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the FeedBurner APIs were deprecated. Google shut down the APIs on October 20, 2012.

Google "retired" AdSense for Feeds on October 2, 2012 and shut it down on December 3, 2012.

Technical problems[]

One frequent perceived technical problem with FeedBurner is the reduced number of subscribers being reported for the blogs using the service. This is not actually a technical problem with FeedBurner, but by the feed readers and aggregators that report to FeedBurner, as FeedBurner collects and tallies from those partners. Usually this problem is connected with one specific RSS reader or client. In April 2009, for example, FeedBurner was having problems reporting subscribers using the Google Feedfetcher service. Regular Feedburner Help Group forum users report feed delivery problems and Google does not provide any support for FeedBurner.