RSS and podcast publishing service FeedBurner has been a great friend to bloggers over the years but this morning announced that it will shut down its own blog Burning Questions. Readers will now be referred to a new blog, AdSense for Feeds. FeedBurner is so useful for so many things beyond serving up ads in feeds that there’s something sad about the symbolism here.
As a part of the announcement FeedBurner offers information for publishers about how to migrate from FeedBurner to a new Google account, as in the future all feed related services will require a Google account. It’s the end of an era, really.
Nice advertising t-shirt, sucker.
FeedBurner was
in the Summer of 2007. People have criticized it for
taking an unhelpful amount of control away from publishers
, for failing to update publishers regarding
, and the Chinese government saying that FeedBurner was just plain unwelcome anywhere in the country.
Still, for everything from analytics, to nice clean easily transferable URLs and accounts, to email subscriptions and adding links into the body of feeds – FeedBurner has been great.
Now it appears to be subsumed by AdSense. Maybe that will mean it will get more attention and updates than it has since the acquisition. Maybe that will mean there are more ads in feeds. Either way, just as so much of the art and communication world now lives in the shadow of advertising and PR, it’s sad to see feed publishing now wholly under the umbrella of Google’s massive advertising business.
Photo: “Spreading the FeedBurner love,” CC by Flickr user 37hz
