How long until Google shuts down Feedburner? The company just announced that it is shutting down Google Reader on July 1. That’s a sad day for all of us who still regularly use it, but its demise was probably inevitable. Reader had been lingering in a stasis for months (maybe even years) now, especially since Google ripped out its social core in favor of focusing on Google+ and barely… → Read More
As part of its latest round of “spring cleaning,” Google just announced that it is shuttering AdSense for Feeds. The service, which allows publishers to earn a bit of extra revenue by adding Google’s ads to their RSS feeds, will be retired on October 2 and will close on December 3. Given that Feedburner has long been expected to be on one of Google’s next spring cleaning lists, it doesn’t come as… → Read More
Three and a half years ago, Google made what seemed to be a pretty big $100 million acquisition: FeedBurner. You remember that company, right? They’re the ones that dominated RSS management before all of that real time tech came along and rendered it obsolete for many people. Today, Google is putting the real time paddles to FeedBurner’s heart in an attempt to rivive it.
If you visit FeedBurner… → Read More
Yesterday, we first reported the news that Twitter had hired Adam Bain away from News Corp. to be their new president of revenue. Today, Twitter is confirming the news noting that Bain will be the president of “global revenue”. They’re also confirming the other hire we reported: Brent Hill, Google’s former head of financial services in the Midwest. He’ll be Twitter’s new director of sales for the… → Read More
We had a great interview with Twitter COO Dick Costolo at the Real-Time CrunchUp on Friday. Costolo always gives the audience a few good nuggets of news and handles the more difficult questions with ease. He’s a pro.
After the conference I reviewed some of the backstage footage we shot of Costolo before he went on stage for the formal interview. We ask lots of great questions – about Twitter’s… → Read More
Former Google exec and the cofounder/CEO of RSS service Feedburner Dick Costolo is Twitter’s new chief operating officer, we’ve heard from multiple sources. Costolo, who sold Feedburner to Google for $100 million in 2007, left Google in July. We’d heard he was looking to start a new company, but obviously Twitter swooped in and grabbed him.
Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s existing head of operations… → Read More
There’s going to be a moment in the near future where FriendFeed needs to deliver realtime search over IM. In a response to Robert Scoble yesterday, Paul Buchheit indicated track or something like it would be high on the list of things to commit to in the next round of improvements to the system. After a series of realtime services and API extensions late last year, FriendFeed has slowed its… → Read More
Every once in a while we show some of the stats about the feed readers people are using to access TechCrunch content. Since we recently passed a million daily RSS readers, now is a good time for a new update.
In June 2006 Firefox, Bloglines and Newsgator were the three largest readers, in that order. Feedburner did an analysis later in 2006 with similar results. Long ago Google reader eclipsed… → Read More
After more than two months of testing, Google has finally turned on AdSense for Feeds. Formerly, these were FeedBurner ads. The acquired company has moved its advertising program over to Google’s system, and now any AdSense advertiser can tap into the Feedburner network. The ads are contextual and come in different sizes and formats. Google Operating System, which noticed that the service is… → Read More
Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo. It is hardly surprising that FeedBurner’s subscriber numbers can be faked. What is surprising is how easy it is to do so. As the video above shows, all you need is a Netvibes account. The folks at the Next Web in Amsterdam took a blog with 43 subscribers and turned that into 2,500 overnight simply by creating an OPML file with… → Read More
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… → Read More
Nearly a year after it was bought by Google for $100 million, FeedBurner is finally going to roll out Google’s AdSense as an advertising option for blogs and Websites that use its service to publish their feeds. FeedBurner will start with a few select publishers next week, and then expand the option to all of its customers soon afterwards. What took them so long? That seemed to be the whole… → Read More
It’s always fun to get the monthly Feedburner check for advertising they insert into the RSS feed. The actual dollar amount is still next to nothing, but I love the fact that, even with nearly 800,000 publishers, 1.4 million managed feeds, and a $100 million payday from Google, they still haven’t automated the check writing process. Someone hand writes all of these checks every month. → Read More
1,511,000: the number of subscribed RSS readers of TechCrunch, according to the Feedburner Widget as I type this post. Given the number is up significantly from the 600,000 odd subscribers we had yesterday, I’m calling it a Feedburner bug. Feedburner has had a long history of doing strange things with the subscriber counter, and TechCrunch’s readership (if the counter is to be… → Read More
FeedBurner has ceased charging for two premium features following their acquisition by Google in May. FeedBurner Stats PRO, a service that provides detailed statistics including subscriber numbers, item clickthrough tracking, podcast downloads and aggregate item uses amongst other features, becomes free. FeedBurner MyBrand, a service that allows users to control the URL of feeds is now free as… → Read More
Google announced the acquisition of Feedburner today on their corporate blog. Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo confirms it as well on the Feedburner blog. The are not disclosing the price, but our source said it was around $100 million when we wrote about the deal last week, and we still believe that figure is accurate. Google doesn’t go into a lot of detail on why they bought the company, but… → Read More
Rumors about Google acquiring RSS management company Feedburner from last week, started by ex-TechCrunch UK editor Sam Sethi, are accurate and are now confirmed according to a source close to the deal. Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for… → Read More
RSS management megavendor FeedBurner released an interesting report this morning about the relative market shares of the various leading RSS reader vendors. The statistics go beyond mere subscription numbers and focus on what FeedBurner says is more important – reader engagement. That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded and displayed… → Read More
Feedburner is testing a new product called “Networks” which are groups of blogs on a single topic that are using Feedburner to manage their RSS feed. The idea is to allow people to subscribe to a single mashed up feed containing all of the content from all of the blogs in that category. See this feed for the venture capital group as an example (which, by the way, I just subscribed to)… → Read More
Chicago-based RSS management company Feedburner is announcing the acquisition of Blogbeat on Monday. The deal will allow Feedburner to expand its reach with customers beyond RSS management. Details as Feedburner.com/blogbeat. We profiled Blogbeat in February. It is a blog analytics service similar to Measure Map (which was itself acquired by Google in February 2006). In a phone conversation last… → Read More
Feedburner and TypePad will announce a partnership on Thursday that will allow TypePad users to automatically redirect their existing TypePad RSS feed into Feedburner. Until now, if a TypePad user wanted to transfer RSS subscribers to a Feedburner RSS feed (and take advantage of Feedburner stats for those subscribers), each subscriber to the old feed would be required to change their subscription… → Read More
Some of you may have noticed that we’ve included a “Subscribe to TechCrunch by Email” widget on the right sidebar of TechCrunch for the last few days. ReadWriteWeb and I have been quietly testing a superb new FeedBurner blog-to-email product that addresses every feature I requested on No. 2 of this list. This new (free) Email Subscriptions product launches officially this morning… → Read More
Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo emailed Richard MacManus and me on Monday to give us a preview of what he calls “broad enhancement to our stats” that are being released later this morning. I’ve had a chance to review the new functionality (screen shot below) and I agree that these changes are both needed and useful. The key change is to give users more information on what items in… → Read More
There have been numerous 2005 “best of” and 2006 “predictions” posts over the last few weeks as the year comes to an end. I’m not going to write one of those. Giving out “best of” awards seems presumptuous to me, given that I’ve been blogging all of six months. And while predictions are fun, they aren’t all that useful in the end. What I do… → Read More
FeedBurner is launching FeedFlare tonight – a group of web services that can be integrated by the publisher into her/his feed. FeedFlare is located under the “Optimize” tab within the FeedBurner dashboard. FeedBurner is also releasing a full set of open APIs to allow third party developers to build and integrate customized services. Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag… → Read More
I’m a big fan of FeedBurner and write about them often. I’m also a “pro” subscriber now and pay the $5/month for that service, which I think is more than fair given how much value they add. I like having the insight into RSS analytics, and FeedBurner has never broken on me. I also consider many of the Feedburner guys friends. Even Dick Costolo, the CEO, has helped me… → Read More
Feedburner released important statistics on their service yesterday. If you are unfamiliar with Feedburner, check out our original profile. The graphs show total feeds managed by feedburner and total subscribers to those feeds. Both show hockey-stick like growth that looks similar to data released by Technorati (see item no. 2 in a past TechCrunch weekly summary). I believe that these stats are… → Read More
Last week, FeedBurner announced a significant redesign of their site. I didn’t post on it right away because the basic stats functionality remains the same. People are generally quite happy with the change. And I have to say FeedBurner is one of my favorite tools – without it I would have a very difficult time understanding how much of our traffic was coming through our RSS feed. → Read More
Company: FeedBurner (BuzzBoost) Location: Chicago Previous Profiles: June 14, 2005, July 4, 2005 What’s New? FeedBurner has been launching a ton of new features lately, and BuzzBoost, announed on July 11, is worth noting. In their own words, “Enter BuzzBoost. It’s the latest publicity and awareness offering for FeedBurner publishers, and it’s free. BuzzBoost’s job is… → Read More
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