Once upon a time, FeedBurner was a scrappy little web company with a big idea: Make it easier for publishers to manage their RSS feeds, and for people to use them.

That was back in 2004, and FeedBurner caught on like wildfire. Bloggers loved being able to have some measure of how many people were using their otherwise unmetered feeds. It was very simple to set up, and FeedBurner was a good citizen when it came to support. Perhaps most importantly, FeedBurner’s SmartFeed and BrowserFriendly features ensured that pretty much every RSS reader of the day could make sense of a burned feed.

The Google cometh

By the time FeedBurner had rolled up a million or so feeds and its distinctive orange chicklets had become ubiquitous across the blogosphere, they had attracted big league attention. In February, 2007, FeedBurner was acquired by Google.

And then what happened was — well, not much. FeedBurner’s blog went stale, and its community languished. To their credit, Google made the service’s premium features free of charge, but no new features — free or otherwise — were added. Perhaps that’s not surprising: Google isn’t famous for quick assimilation of its purchases, and it’s not reasonable to expect a big rollout of new functionality before Google gets everything on their own servers and platform.

FeedBurner is now Google AdSense for Feeds, and users are slowly being converted to the new identity. But all is not well. Users have been impatient and frustrated with Google’s lack of urgency in handling what used to be a mobile, customer-focused service.

A rocky transition

Inquisitr’s Duncan Riley publicly mused that the newly minted AdSense for Feeds seemed destined to be about advertising, not feed management. Google changed FeedBurner’s ping address without much fanfare, falling deaf to the various sites and services screaming for attention at the old one. And there remain concerns about FeedBurner’s current performance.

As a publisher, I’ve been using FeedBurner for years. The traditional advantages of FeedBurner are so familiar they really don’t need to be repeated here. But if you’re looking for a refresher, check our Marshall Kirkpatrick’s excellent primer on How and Why to Use FeedBurner.

Why FeedBurner is not longer hot

At the same time, FeedBurner is showing its age. While Google has ignored its new baby, technology has been steaming ahead. Many of the key advantages offered by FeedBurner are no longer as pressing as they used to be. How long has it been, for instance, since you ran into a problem subscribing a feed – whether via FeedBurner or not? Format compatibility isn’t an issue these days, and most RSS clients and feed aggregators will handle everything you throw at them. And some of FeedBurner’s other features seem less attractive than in the past:

• Feed flares: Most of these are useless junk. The Digg, Delicious, and StumbleUpon buttons aren’t as useful as the browser and client tools available to those most likely to use them. In any case, if you are using FeedBurner’s advanced metrics, you’re simply encouraging users to bookmark the Google or FeedBurner redirect addresses of your articles. This makes no sense at all (and is the reason I don’t use this feature on my sites).
• RSS subscriber metrics: For some sites, this information is very useful. But with the Google/FeedBurner redirected URLs, you’re paying a high price for this service. There are other ways to measure your RSS reach.
• Site statistics: I expect Google to integrate feed metrics and Google Analytics. As it stands now, though, FeedBurner’s site metrics are pretty crude when compared with other solutions.
• Subscriber count chicklets: Nobody believes them. Nobody cares. They’re cluttering your sidebar.
• Feed ad insertions: There are many ways to do this without AdSense for Feeds.
• Link Splicer and Photo Splicer: Once cool features, the ability to dump bookmarks and images from 3rd party services into your RSS feed has now been made obsolete by the emergence of lifestreaming. If you’re sending stuff like this to your blog stream and something like FriendFeed, you’re actually creating annoying duplicates of your links.
• Email subscriptions: I have personally made extensive use of FeedBurner’s email options, which are free and fairly reliable in terms of delivery success. Over half my FeedBurner subscribers on Lighter Footstep are actually reading the feed in their inbox, and this is huge. But if you’re willing to pay a little something, there are commercial services which do a much better job. Chris Garrett was ahead of the curve on this one, and I think it makes sense for some bloggers to explore mailing list development  using professional grade management tools.

It’s quite possible that Google will modernize AdSense for Feeds later this year. As it stands now, however, the bloom is off the rose. FeedBurner’s flame just isn’t burning all that brightly anymore.

But wait — that’s not all

There are two other important considerations. Dave Winer has expressed one of them pretty clearly: We may not be serving ourselves well by allowing a third party – especially one the size of Google — such influence over an essential component of our publishing. I don’t think a tinfoil hat is a good look for me, but Google is a powerful entity, and investing them with an essential portion of our readership raises questions about how information concerning our sites is used, and the future nature and availability of feed services.

And there’s what is being called the Real-Time Web. The definition of this concept is still a bit slippery, but it boils down to the fact that the web is beginning to move faster than our Old School blogging technologies. New standards, such as SUP and XMPP, are making instantaneous publishing practical. Publish a post — boom — it shows up immediately on a SUP-aware service like FriendFeed. No waiting for Google’s spiders to poll your feed.

Fast rules

This capability doesn’t really matter on my sites, none of which currently deal in breaking news. But if you’re a tech or social media blogger, you’re living in a ferociously competitive landscape. Twenty minutes can easily be the difference between first on a story (and first to Digg’s front page) and explaining to an editor why you just got skunked.

Beyond the blogosphere, the possibilities for instant publishing seem obvious: Stockbrokers pushing real-time quotes to clients; continuously updated news or product pricing; perhaps even delivery of emergency information. None of this is currently possible within the framework of FeedBurner/Adsense for Feeds.

So perhaps it’s time to let FeedBurner burn, and reconsider self-hosted feeds. This decision may not be easy or even possible for sites which are already heavily invested in FeedBurner. But for those who are willing to give up something to get something back — or for new projects — there are potential rewards for going it alone.

Tagged as: FeedBurner, Feeds, Google, RSS, SUP, XMPP