Over a year has passed since Google completed the acquisition of feed massaging and hosting service Feedburner, and today some users now finally have their feeds hosted on what appears to be Google’s servers and infrastructure. At Techcrunch we have always been big fans of Feedburner, and their widgets and RSS subscriber counts have adorned almost all of our sites since their first days. At some point in the past 12 hours, the feed URL at feeds.feedburner.com began to redirect to feedproxy.google.com. Our subscriber count widget dropped to displaying a zero count for a few hours while the domain change took place.
It appears that only select feeds have been migrated, mostly those with higher subscriber counts. This would indicate that Feedburner has turned to Google to assist with serving the load on high-traffic feeds. Over at TechcrunchIT I recently wrote about the problems that some acquired companies have experienced at Google. The proprietary software and hosting stack at Google can often lead to a slowdown in development, an often long migration phase and in some cases death for the acquired company or product. Feedburner has avoided these problems by remaining largely independent of Google since the acquisition, but at some point they have turned to pappa bear for assistance with handling load and we are seeing the results of that today.