If you are running your feeds through Feedburner, you should know that Google bought that service in 2007.
Now they are making the next step, moving the feeds from Feedburner.com to feeds.google.com.
And you have to follow… and you should do it before the end of February 2009.
How? well there is nice instruction written by Michel Martin from Pro Blog Design on How to Move from Feedburner to Google
I just moved my Feeds over to my Google account and it is really easy and you cannot !! go back!
The analytics are nice, although I cannot click on the time line anymore to go to the statistics of my readers, you now have to use a drop-down menu to choose that date.
But you can see the mail addresses of the people who subscribed via the Feedburner email option.
So that is nice, there are however also a few drawbacks…
Even with the Smart-feed options active, you now just get a limited number of options if you want to subscribe to my feed:
So it seems Google is now cashing in on the Feedburner service and using it to promote their own services and adverts.
Why the move from Feedburner to Google feeds?
Here are some ideas that are on my mind that might be the reasons for Google to force this move upon us Feedburner users:
- Getting the feed data into the central Google index would mean easier and faster integration into the search results pages (well that would be nice:-))
- Monetizing the feeds by adding an easy way to integrate adsense adverts (lets see if that works?)
- Getting more grip on spammers that use a lot of feeds via Feedburner to spam the search index
- Promoting their own feed reader instead of giving people the choice of their favorite feed reader service
- Promoting the use of Google personal page to integrate feeds instead of offering the option to using services like Netvibes
- Taking away the second email subscription option and instead driving people to wards Google mail.
All these reasons will have a large impact on some of the services and companies that where integrated or build on the Feedburner service…
Can you think of any other evil and non-evil reasons, please post them in the comments.
I would love to read your ideas on the reasons for this move.
