FeedBurner
Encyclopedia
FeedBurner is a web feed
Web feed
A web feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it. Making a collection of web feeds accessible in one spot is known as aggregation, which is performed by an aggregator...

 management provider launched in 2004. FeedBurner was founded by Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo is the current CEO of Twitter and was its former COO. He took over as CEO from Evan Williams in October 2010.He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan. Costolo became involved in theater during his sophomore year at University of...

, Eric Lunt, Steve Olechowski, and Matt Shobe. Costolo, a University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...

 graduate, became CEO of Twitter
Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking and microblogging service that enables its users to send and read text-based posts of up to 140 characters, informally known as "tweets".Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched that July...

 in 2010. FeedBurner provides custom RSS
RSS (file format)
RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format...

 feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

ers, and other web-based content publishers.

Services

Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis
Web analytics
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage....

 and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format, authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner's feeds. Users can find out how many people have subscribed to their feeds and with what service/program they subscribed only.

Published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg
Digg
Digg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...

 and del.icio.us
Del.icio.us
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, and by the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs...

, and "splicing" information from multiple feeds. FeedBurner is a typical Web 2.0
Web 2.0
The term Web 2.0 is associated with web applications that facilitate participatory information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the World Wide Web...

 service, providing web service
Web service
A Web service is a method of communication between two electronic devices over the web.The W3C defines a "Web service" as "a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network". It has an interface described in a machine-processable format...

 application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it. As of October 5, 2007, FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers, including 142,534 podcast
Podcast
A podcast is a series of digital media files that are released episodically and often downloaded through web syndication...

 and videocast feeds.

History

On June 3, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google Inc., for a rumored price of $100 million. One month later, two of their popular "PRO" services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to all users.

On August 15, 2008, Google completed migration of FeedBurner into its group of services. Publishers who have completed migration will access FeedBurner via feedburner.google.com.

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the FeedBurner APIs would be deprecated, leaving the long-term availability of an API for FeedBurner uncertain.

Technical problems

One frequent perceived technical problem with FeedBurner is the reduced number of subscribers being reported for the blogs using the service. This is not actually a technical problem with FeedBurner, but by the feed readers and aggregators that report to FeedBurner, as FeedBurner collects and tallies from those partners. Usually this problem is connected with one specific RSS reader or client. In April 2009, for example, FeedBurner was having problems reporting subscribers using the Google Feedfetcher service.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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