Review: FeedBurner.com goes FREE
Just over one month since Google officially brought FeedBurner, they have offered their PRO features for free. Not being someone to turn down an offer this good I decided to investigate—there must be a reason so many other people use it, right?
One of the many benefits that FeedBurner publishers will enjoy now that FeedBurner is part of the Google family is a little something we like to call, “more for free!” Beginning today, two of FeedBurner’s previously for-pay services, TotalStats and MyBrand, will be free.
I would just like to point out that I am (or rather “was”) a FeedBurner virgin, so I will have the luxery of having no limits from the start. Hell, I have even only started really getting into RSS a couple months ago when I downloaded Vienna; a fantastic lightweight, open source RSS Reader for Mac OSX. Anyways, let’s plough straight into first impressions.
First impressions
Easy signup process, I didn’t even need to confirm my email address—something unheard of in todays world, and incredibly easy to setup the feed—just plonk your RSS feed’s URL into a box and away you go. As you would come to expect you can’t get reliable stats until a couple weeks later so I will look into that then. All good so far.
The good
- Analyzing Subscribers. We humans are naturally curious, we like to know if anyone is out there paying attention to us. Well, we Web people are just like those searching for little green men. My subscribers seem to be mostly coming from either NetNewsWire or Google Feedfetcher. Curiosity has not killed the cat with FeedBurner.
- PingShot. Having FeedBurner automatically tell other sites that we have new content is a great addition, and a cool time saver from people whom lead busy lives. Like me.
- FeedCount. A way to tell the rest of the world how many subscribers you have is pretty handy to show of with. However, I would prefer there to be some kind of API which I can simple get and display as I want—I think this is included in their Awareness API, but I haven’t delved too deep in that just yet.
The bad
- The whole Optimize tab. Seriously, what is going on with that? Okay, okay, SmartFeed is good, but surely you expect something like ‘Make my feed compatible with any feed reader application’ to be, well, “on” by default?
Conclusion
FeedBurner looks to be a potential system, for me seeing as I only really want statistics, and I am sure there are thousands upon thousands of happy customers—especially now it is free. The only other thing besides this that I would want is the potential to get, in plain text or XML, the stats for my own Website. I shall report back later with my thoughts on how the stats are displayed.
1 Peter wrote
7th July, 2007
I have been thinking of trying them out for a while now. Seems they have a few good points from what you have said.