Google has finally begun migrating RSS feeds that are being hosted on Feedburner over to Google's own servers. It's been over a year since Google acquired Feedburner, and since then the service's 1.92 million feeds have generally been untouched. Why now? Google has begun rolling out Adsense for feeds after closing the doors on Feedburner's CPM-based advertising solution.
The new year has just begun and if 2008 is anything like 2007, we should expect a bunch of acquisitions in the tech world. As I heard someone say recently, acquisitions should be considered the lottery for geeks, except the odds of "winning" are much higher than the actual lottery.
Many of you have probably heard of the Google Feedfetcher before if you're a FeedBurner publisher. It is what Google uses to go and crawl RSS feeds for people subscribed to them using Google IG, Google Reader, and any other place Google displays feeds.
If you visit Google today, you'll notice the usual logo has been replaced with the one you see pictured to the right. It's Google's 9th Birthday, and they're celebrating! While there are actually several dates that could be considered Google's birthday, clearly they acknowledge today, September 27th as their official birthday, the day that they became incorporated and their name was officially Google inc.
FeedBurner just announced that because they were acquired by Google they are now able to offer their PRO package at no cost to all users. What kind of goodness does such a package get you? For starters you can get advanced stat tracking that lets you see who has viewed or clicked items in your feed.
Google buy FeedBurner was the question that everybody was asking last week when rumors surfaced that an acquisition was under-way. It makes perfect sense. FeedBurner is known as RSS Management service that many, many sites use, as well as an advertising service that’s held its own.
I have always been a big fan of using the FeedBurner Headline Animator as a signature in your emails, forum posts, and just about anywhere else that you’re trying to attract new readers.
Yesterday we reported that Google was going to start providing the number of subscribers to a feed each time it went to fetch it. Like other online feed readers many people might subscribe to a feed, but Google only goes to fetch it at specified intervals.
In January, Google updated their Feed Reader Module for the Google Personalized Homepage so that items could be expanded and contracted. This makes it easy to reed the items without ever having to leave. It was a move that showed that Google was listening to their users.
