Feedburner gives you your feed back, finally
July 5th, 2007 by Benjamin KuoIt looks like the first move Google is making at Feedburner (which it acquired earlier this year), is making their PRO level services free to users. Which I think is really long due, and a smart move.
A year or two ago, VC Brad Feld had referred me to Dick Costello, the CEO of Feedburner, about using Feedburner.com for our web sites. I told Dick I’d pass, because I didn’t like the idea of using a Feedburner URL and giving ownership of the feed location to his company. For those not familiar with Feedburner, it’s a service that (in exchange for pointing all of your users to Feedburner’s version of your feed) provides deep statistics, advertising, and other services around your RSS feed. However, in order to use the service, you had to point all of your RSS users to Feedburner’s domains (ie instead of going to socaltech.com, you’d have to go to feedburner.com to see our RSS feeds).
Back when I first started socaltech.com (as a lowly hand-copied, email CC list to a dozen or so people), I initially started using a third party email message list service. I quickly figured out I should host the mailing list myself, because of the issues of control–in this case, the company I was using wouldn’t allow you to place advertising in your mailing list, they got to insert their own advertising at the bottom of every email, and otherwise had a lock on your users. The issue I had with Feedburner was similar; what happened if the company were acquired? How about if they decided to suddenly charge per subscriber? Or if they went out of business? It’s never good when you’re running a business (or even a personal project) where someone else “owns” your customer list.
Eventually, Feedburner added their PRO service, and specifically their MyBrand service, which allowed more sophisticated RSS feed owners to have your own domain as the feed you were pointing users at, i.e. instead of feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedhere, feeds.socaltech.com/yourfeedhere. They used to charge a monthly fee to give “own” your own feed using MyBrand, but with this move it’s now free. It’s a really smart move; there are a lot of feed owners (myself include) who would NEVER move their feed pointers to someone else’s domain, no matter what kinds of services they offered.
