Tuesday, July 3, 2007

FeedBurner Now Completely Free

The basic version of the FeedBurner RSS service was always free, but there were some advanced features you had to pay for. Now that the tool’s been acquired by Google, FeedBurner is completely free (and existing pro account users will not be charged from this month onwards). The features made free are:

• The statistics of how many people viewed, or clicked an individual post of your feed (this was part of what FeedBurner called “TotalStats”)
• The “Read” stats, which are an estimation of how many subscribers interacted with your feed on a given day
• A feature called “MyBrand” which allows you to set up a FeedBurner feed right on your domain

The FeedBurner blog writes, “We suspect this will be welcome news to the 450,000+ of you using many of our other free services, but understanding that your feed is your feed, you will need to activate these newly freed-up services in order to partake in their awesomeness.”

The last feature in particular sounds very tempting – if you can fully access your server it means you can run a FeedBurner feed on “yourdomain.com/myFeedName”, which means your subscribers don’t have to change their bookmarks... and you can easily switch away from this feed service when you don’t like what they offer anymore.

This isn’t the first time Google snaps up some service or program to then release it for free a while later. Ionut Alex. Chitu on his blog notes “Google did this with Blogger PRO, Picasa, Keyhole (now Google Earth), Urchin (now Google Analytics), SketchUp.” With a competitor like Google, it sure sounds like it’s hard for other web app makers to establish anything actually paid on the market.

[Thanks Ionut!]

FeedBurner Now Completely ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5+2)

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