What’s Feedburner?
A lot of people want to know what’s the point in Feedburner? Why use Feedburner? And what does Feedburner do? I attempted to find out…
Feedburner is a feed management system that was launched in 2004 and has now recently been acquired by Internet colossal Google. I’ve been trying to figure out what the point in Feedburner is for a while now and this is what I’ve come up with. Basically if you own any type of RSS feed whether it’s from a weblog or a Podcast or otherwise, Feedburner is a service that consolidates that feed so that a much wider variety of feed readers are capable of receiving it. The free service, which I have tested also comes with a control panel, which allows you to monitor how many people have subscribed to your feed and allows you to further optimise and publicise your feed.
PingShot, FeedFlare & BuzzBoost
One useful item I did notice is the PingShot feature, which automatically notifies Web 2.0 giants such as Technorati, Yahoo! and Bloglines when you’ve added new content to your feed. Another of the potentially constructive features on Feedburner is the inclusion of an HTML feed generator, which provides a more readable version of your RSS feed with the option to modify the styles. You can also transfer this straight to Blogger or TypePad.
Feedburner’s self-proclaimed biggest asset is the ability for you to include advertisements within your RSS feed – something that is only worth embarking upon if your feed is a receiver of a large amount of subscribers. You may notice that at the bottom of this article there are a few options allowing you to add this post to a number of Web 2.0’s biggest players. This is another example of Web 2.0’s capability of linking communities from rival sites into one. This feature again was made simple to implement by Feedburner’s FeedFlare element and allows further interactivity between readers and publishers. FeedFlare is one of a number of optimisation services offered by the Feedburner control panel, which can help but I cannot see any huge significance of its use at this time.
Feedburner is like many other of today’s Web 2.0 technologies as it integrates other Web 2.0 apps into one big mixing bowl, but I’m not so sure about the idea of Google having complete control of my feed. It’s likely that Feedburner will be tied into Google Reader, which could mean Google dropping support for non-Feedburner feeds. I’d say it’s better to be part of Feedburner than not part of it. If your blog is successful it lets you understand your audience better, or otherwise that you need an audience in the first place.
By Adam Moss