After my
post that reviewed promising new email subscription services Zookoda
and Yutter, I got an email from Feedburner
telling me they had a new email service in the works. Tonight it was released –
in fact you may have noticed it in my site menu earlier today. True to form,
Feedburner’s new offering is slick and took only a few minutes to set up in my
Feedburner account and on my website.
The main features:
- The emails are not branded, so they look as if they come from the
publisher (and the reply-to email address is that of the publisher). - The publisher has full access to their email list, within their Feedburner
account, and can export it anytime. - The email subscription form is cut-and-past javascript, which is easy for
the publisher to implement. - The emails are delivered daily.
- The HTML rendering of the blog content is very good, on a par with (even
better in some cases) a normal RSS Reader. - It’s a free service.
- No subscriber interface in which the subscriber can manage things at
FeedBurner. - No subscriber landing page on signup.
Those last two points signify that this is a publisher-centric offering from
Feedburner and they’re not attempting to be an email aggregator. This is in line
with what Zookoda and Yutter are doing.
Feedburner has existing partnerships with
Squeet and Feedblitz (note: Phil Hollows from Feedblitz made some good comments in
my previous post, in response to my criticism of them). But it’s always made
sense for Feedburner to integrate email into their service – and make it as
publisher-friendly as possible.
Sample of email
Feedburner’s large user base and the fact that so many influential bloggers
use their service already is going to make it tough for Zookoda and Yutter to
make headway. Many bloggers, like I did today, will find it easier to just
‘switch on’ the Feedburner option rather than start a new account with an
unknown service. Mike Arrington certainly
thinks so.
However I’m planning to give both Zoodoka and Yutter a fair chance for my
business, because I was impressed enough with their feature sets to want to trial
them further. And I will, once I get some time to implement them on R/WW.
Of course now that Feedburner has entered the market with its own product,
it’ll be interesting to see how Zoodoka, Yutter and the others differentiate
themselves. Zoodoka seems to have more advanced features than Feedburner, like
creating custom email newsletters. And Yutter has some nice options too, such as blog branding, which
Feedburner lacks. So
despite the odds being stacked in RSS heavyweight Feedburner’s favor, I’m not
declaring Game Over just yet.
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