Let’s Say FeedBurner Shuts Down…
They barely care about FeedBurner as it is. They've discontinued all of the advertising intergration, not updated the blog in any amount of time nor do you really get that much of the product itself. There's some pretty basic Google Analytics connection, but the main data we get out of it is download numbers for our podcast (http://76streetpod.com) and podcast network (http://76streetnetwork.com). It seems like every couple weeks the statistics stop for unexplained reasons only to have the Google group light up with nary an explanation. Along with mostly useless developer documentation for how the product outputs what it does or how it changes entries in a feed, FeedBurner is a useless hunk of crap that is almost certain to shutdown. An recent gripe is that when you use it as a feed proxy it doesn't pass along subscriber numbers like any other good feed parser, so a FeedBurner feed of a FeedBurner feed doesn't pass long info to the original FeedBurner feed or feed (but will pass along downloads, though it's only because FeedBurner is just a glorified Location header then.) I originally only went with FeedBurner over an open solution for expediency, but I've never liked giving Google more information on our users or giving up my control of our feeds to a product that has been limping along for years. It wouldn't take much effort to replicate FeedBurner. Maybe it's time I hunker down and do it. I've been planning for a FeedBurner switch since the beginning by using its "branded" feed feature and using a subdomain of ours for feed hosting. I hope everyone else has been wise enough to do so, as well, though looking at our network membership feeds, I know they haven't.
An alternative.. http://uri.lv/
w/ migration from feedburner.. http://uri.lv/feeds/migrate
If you're using FeedBurner and haven't already, consider enabling the MyBrand service. It's free, and gives you full control of the feed URL. I wrote instructions for doing so here: http://www.midwesternmac.com/blogs/jeff-geerling/using-feedb...
[Edit: link]
There's a bigger problem: FeedBurner wraps URLs in the google feedproxy redirector. If they shut that down, a ton of old shared links will break.
The one wrinkle I can see is that a lot of podcasts (including my own) use Feedburner. While shutting down Reader directly affects the people who chose to use it, shutting down Feedburner would disrupt a millions of innocent users. The end user just sees a great podcast go offline and subsequent firestorm of blaming Google. They'd be shutting down the customers of their customers, which seems a little more evil.
This was my first thought as well when they announced the death of Reader. I don't see why they'd keep feedburner running. If they're going to kill it, they should just announce it now, rather than prolonging the pain.
Some thoughts:
1. I haven't looked but I bet there's already a WordPress plugin that counts feed download stats. Or just use tracking links (redirect with a counter) in your feed--lots of services (Budurl) do that if you're not a coder.
2. It's disgusting that Feedburner feeds do not anywhere reveal the original URL of the source material. I'm glad this is getting attention finally.
3. As a user, I don't want the middleman Feedburner between me and the source material. 80% of the time you can just add /feed/ to the blog's URL and WordPress will have the original feed there for you. Even if it's not advertised--it's still there :-)
I doubt Feedburner will ever be shut down (by Google at least). The backlash that Google will suffer can not be worth the savings they will receive by shutting it down. It will remain a tax on a bad acquisition decision and it'll continue on with the bare minimum of maintenance.
Maybe Google will "sell" the service to a lesser known company who will let the service die after a while. They could also spin it off with a seed fund of its own and allow it to die if it can't be profitable. This method might allow Google to get away with killing the service and take so much of the blame.
I believe Feedburner will ultimately shut down, the question isn't really IF it'll shut down BUT WHEN it'll shut down. We have a simple to use Feed Fetching API at https://www.feedsapi.org with our extended documentation (in work) at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vCL_W9XGnsa-EN8oAhNl8tOq... , it’s not a clone of the Google Reader API, but it’s really good for what it’s supposed to do.
Google Reader was too much integrated into the Google brand and also had a very easy and clear migration path to other services. You like it or not it's expandable.
Feedburner on the other hand would be harder to migrate. They might do the same as they did to SketchUp and just sell the service to someone that is interested in making a business out of it.
Wouldn't it make more sense for Google to first shut down FeedBurner and then Google Reader?
That way Google could ensure all FeedBurner subscriptions in Reader would be replaced A) with the location of the new feed provided by the site owner, or B) in case of no action from the site owner fall back to the original feed as known by FeedBurner.
When they've done that, they can shutdown Google Reader and all the new RSS readers out there that let you import your Google Reader feeds would have the new updated non-FeedBurner feeds.
I guess having a 301 redirect option in FeedBurner and advising other RSS readers to implement would work as well, but it seems more error prone than Google solving as much of this problem as possible themselves. With Google Reader they are/were in the ideal place to do so. I realize it requires some development costs, but it would be a nice gesture to their user base.
Of course this is all hypothetical. We don't know what Google's plans are for FeedBurner. Perhaps the fact they shutdown Google Reader is an indication FeedBurner is here to stay for the time being as otherwise they would have taken the above approach.
It's not only Feedburner what will be shut down, blogger will shutdown because G+ team already working on the alternative
Introducing their own blogging platform:
I'm not a feedburner user myself, but it looks like a lot of people use it just for stats - I wonder could google roll it into google analytics as an extra stream?
Google Alerts + email filters = makeshift RSS reader. Now if Google cans Alerts I'll throw down.
feedburner shuts down