If you visit FeedBurner today, you’ll see a “Try out our NEW (beta) version!” message in the top menu. Clicking on this will take you to the new version. So what’s new? The entire look and feel has been revamped. The new Home screen is loaded up with overview stats and alerts for the sites you run. But the real key, of course, is in the Feeds area.

Here’s you’ll see a completely new way of looking at your subscribers and data. In a move that should surprise no one, it looks a lot more like Google Analytics. But the key is what’s going on behind the scenes. As Google notes:

The real story is what’s new under the hood, however: the new interface provides real time stats for clicks, views, and podcast downloads, which means you can start seeing what content is drawing traffic from feed readers, Twitter, and other syndicated sources as it happens.

In fact, Google mentions Twitter a couple times in their post about the update — more than they mention their own RSS reader product, Google Reader. Clearly, they see where the future of content consumption is heading.

And it’s interesting that Twitter is so vital here. One of FeedBurner’s co-founders and CEO was Dick Costolo — yes, the same man who is now the CEO of Twitter.

Costolo left Google in July of 2009 after he had already moved on from the FeedBurner team. It seemed pretty clear to many of us that after the acquisition, Google wasn’t putting the resources it should have into the product. And its time at Google has been filled with bugs, problems, and a general growing disinterest from most users.

Maybe that will change now. Maybe. This update is about two years too late.

[thanks Michael]

We already talked about why Bain’s hire seems like a good one for Twitter — as President of Fox Audience Network (FAN), he was able to pump money out of the mostly dismal group of digital products at News Corp. Hill’s hiring, meanwhile, follows the hiring earlier this month of Dan Coughlin from Facebook to head sales on the East coast, and Amanda Levy from Yelp to head sales on the West coast. Twitter’s sales team now spans the U.S.

Here’s Twitter COO Dick Costolo’s canned statement on today’s announcements:

With Adam and Brent joining the team, we now have senior sales executives from a wide spectrum of industry leaders, including Fox, Google, Facebook and Yelp, comprising our leadership team. We expect this team to build on our already strong momentum in providing promotions and deals that bring value to both users and an increasing number of brands.

Speaking of Costolo, the Hill hiring must be particularly pleasing for him because before Google, Hill was the vice president of advertising services at FeedBurner — the company Costolo co-founded and sold to Google in 2007 for $100 million.

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 revenue, business model, details of the search deals, chances of getting bought next year, and the lovely bathrooms they have at the office. He manages to entertain the entire TechCrunch editorial staff while revealing absolutely nothing. We even slip in a question about Feedburner (Costolo cofounded the company and sold it to Google in 2007) at the end, but sadly we ran out of tape before he answered.

One thing Costolo does clear up – even though I’ve known him for five years now, I apparently have been mispronouncing his name the whole time.

Steve Gillmor is going to love this, of course, since he proclaimed that RSS was dead and Twitter was the new messaging protocol bus, or something to that effect. “Rest In Peace, RSS,” he wrote, saying “It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter…All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.”

Santosh Jayaram, Twitter’s existing head of operations (and also from Google), will presumably remain with the company and report to Costolo.

Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that.

Twitter is actively hiring more senior people, we’ve heard. In July they hired Alexander Macgillivray, Google’s associate general counsel for Product and IP, as their new General Counsel.

The reasons for a realtime search mechanism can be debated, but what will be unavoidable is the implications of not moving forward for both FriendFeed and Twitter. The market for micromessaging may appear to be growing, what with major media outlets signing on and blogger firestorms about the value to individual brands dominating the holiday slowdown of so-called “real” news. But in fact, the Twitter bandwagon has propped up only the least significant part of the micromessaging wave.

The tip of the iceberg, Twitter’s marketing power or FriendFeed’s “conversation”, has not yet reached the kind of ubiquity micromessengers expect and not so secretly count on. The ROI on managing a Twitter Follow community produces reasonable economies of scale for only a very few. The Scobles must maintain their clouds regardless of the effort expended, while the up and comers are getting squeezed on FriendFeed by noisier folks willing to marginalize the threads with noise. People like Tim O’Reilly apparently avoid the comments and likes, and as a result the domain itself.

The disconnect and inequity of the current environment is substantially due to the lack of Track, which smooths out the signal to noise cycle by providing a realtime actionable opportunity that can be mined after the fact as “content.” Filtering built on top of Track will help tamp down spam and bot strategies, and it will also produce a set of favored filters that will both curate the flow and keep it open to new talent.

The small window of time when Track first emerged was not enough to evangelize its powers to the general audience, and obfuscation by vendors and entrenched interests kept the lid on for the second half of the year. But FriendFeed’s investments in realtime took the baton from Evan Prodromou and the open source Laconica project and made it clear that at least three business models are orbiting the realtime micromessaging opportunity.

In historical terms, we’re seeing a battle for control of the core realtime ping server. How long this post will take to reach RSS will illustrate how the major platform vendor in RSS is handling its responsibility as the major player. With its purchase of FeedBurner and recent rolloever of FeedBurner URLs to its own domain, Google has experienced some significant latency in syncing new posts to its dominant RSS feeds. This post, when published via WordPress, is made available to Feedburner within seconds. Yet most posts I’ve published in the last several weeks have averaged over two hours before they propagate to the RSS audience of Google Reader, FriendFeed, Twitter, and beyond.

TechCrunch engineers have implemented an auto ping service to try and fix the problem, but Google’s stated policy is to provide replication within 30 minutes. Whatever the case, and whether or not we’re correctly implementing a ping or not, the notion that blog posts are effectively removed from a realtime audience which is increasingly dominant is mindbogglingly stupid. Some even suggest there are competitive reasons for this lack of a strategy, but I can’t quite construct a convincing rationale for it to date. However, I will throw out the apparent fact that Google makes much more from Web pages than they do from RSS pages.

Inevitably, FriendFeed will roll out Track, and so will Twitter in short order, perhaps even sooner than FriendFeed’s smaller team can prioritize it. Until then, we will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Note: I am publishing this post at 3:31PM Pacific time.

Update: 5:01PM No RSS.

Update: 5:52PM Still broken.

Update: Finally hit RSS at 6:17PM.

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 all of those readers. And recently, Outlook has surged as the feed reader of choice.

Of our roughly 1.4 million RSS readers, 520,000, or about 38%, come from Outlook. 390,000, or about 28%, come from Google Reader. Newsgator and BlogRovR are next with about 10% each, followed by Netvibes, Bloglines, AOL, Flock, Yahoo and the Windows Media Center.

The complete breakdown is below.

The ads are contextual and come in different sizes and formats. Google Operating System, which noticed that the service is now turned on, reports:

The new AdSense for Feeds option lets you create a new ad unit that has a format automatically selected from 468×60 and 300×250. . . . You can choose if you want image ads, the ad frequency, the position (top or bottom of the post), the colors and a channel that tracks the ad performance.

Hopefully, this will turbocharge ads in feeds, which have not been a stellar performer so far. Does anybody click on those ads? Maybe they should be seen more as branding opportunity, because you certainly see them when you are scrolling through your blog and news feeds.

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 the same feed copied 2,500 times and pasting it into their Netvibes page. The result was 2,500 widgets of the blog feed, which FeedBurner counts as separate subscribers.

Why does this matter? Blogs like to tout how many RSS subscribers they have because, even if it is a smaller number than direct visitors to their site, it represents their most loyal readers. That’s why we display how many RSS readers we have in the Feedburner chicklet at the top of TechCrunch (currently 850,000). For these numbers to have any meaning, though, they cannot be as easy to game as the video shows. (And, no, we don’t game our numbers).

You’d think that Google would be smart enough not to double-count these things, or at least ask Netvibes and other widget start pages to de-duplicate the numbers for them by user. What appears to be happening here is that FeedBurner counts each widget for a particular feed on Netvibes as a separate subscriber, regardless of whether that widget is on ten thousand different user pages or repeated ten thousand times on the same page. The same thing happened a couple years ago with Pageflakes.

Update: Netvibes VP of Product Development Franck Mahon responds in comments that it is working to fix the problem of duplicates, but that there are other ways to “hack the numbers.” And he notes that it might be more useful to count active subscribers than just people who may have added a feed two years ago and never read it.

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.

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 point of the acquisition.

FeedBurner intersperses ads in blog feeds between every few posts. Integrating with AdSense will allow for publishers to tap into contextual ads for their feeds, in addition to the ads that FeedBurner already sells.

Hopefully, Google also found the time to integrate its automated back-end payment system into all FeedBurner accounts. Until recently, FeedBurner was still sends out paper checks to publishers participating in its ad network. At least, that’s how TechCrunch gets paid.

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.

By the way, there’s been a bit of a stir caused by reports yesterday that Feedburner turned off historical stats. CEO Dick Costolo said via email that it was just a bug caused by a code update, and it will be fixed shortly.

Feedburner has had a long history of doing strange things with the subscriber counter, and TechCrunch’s readership (if the counter is to be believed) can fluctuate by over 50,000 readers from day to day, but I’ve never seen a 900,000 jump.

If you’ve just gained (or even lost) an extra hundred thousand readers, or perhaps even a million, let us know in the comments.

Update (MA): Occam’s Razor; Feedburner’s CEO Dick Costolo has confirmed it was a bug and that it will be fixed shortly.

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 well; a move that will be strongly welcomed. For many, the biggest argument against using Feedburner was the need to give up control of your feed URL (for example, http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch). Being able to keep ownership of a feed complete with site branding will drive new many new users to Feedburner, including yours truly.

FeedBurner PRO and MyBrand accounts will not be billed effective from June. Although the services are now free, Feedburner users are required to “upgrade” to them from within the Feedburner control panel.

(via SEL)

Google doesn’t go into a lot of detail on why they bought the company, but they do say they are constantly looking for ways to “identify and offer new tools for content creators and website publishers” and “give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users.”

That tells me one thing: look for the option to include Adwords in your feed sometime very soon. Feedburner already sells adds into feeds on a CPM basis. Google’s going to crank this up.

The information we have is that the deal is now under a binding term sheet and will close in 2-3 weeks, and there is nothing that can really derail it at this point.

Huge congratulations to Feedburner. The company was founded in 2003 and has raised just $10 million in capital over two rounds. Portage Ventures funded their $1 million Series A round in 2004. The $9 million Series B round was closed in mid 2005 (second close in 2006), from Mobius Venture Capital and Union Square Ventures.

That engagement is measured in two ways, the number of times the feed’s items are loaded and displayed in the reader (called views)  and the number of times a feed’s link is clicked through (called clicks).  TechCrunch, for example, may now have almost 300,000 people subscribed to its feed who log on to their feed reader in a given day – but only a portion of those people view the TechCrunch feed in particular on a given day. I know I’m subscribed to many feeds that I almost never actually read, FeedBurner’s engagement metrics try to parse that behavior out from active readership.

The winning vendors in reader engagement are interesting but so are the larger implications of the numbers being reported. Full details and discussion below the fold (for those not viewing this in a feed reader, that is!)

The moral of the story is that Google Reader has come out of nowhere and stolen the hearts of active RSS users.

Views

When it comes to views, Google Reader is the clear leader with a methodologically conservative 59% of views.  That means that 59% of the time a FeedBurner published feed is being displayed in a web based aggregator – it’s being displayed in a Google Reader account.  That’s amazing.  Google Reader just began reporting subscriber numbers to FeedBurner last week.  Bloggers everywhere saw their subscriber numbers jump an average of 53% according to FeedBurner.  Now this statistic indicating that Google users are actually accessing the feeds they have subscribed to far more than any other vendor shows that in just a short period of time since the product’s relaunch – Google Reader owns the online feed reading market.

Bloglines, perhaps unsurprisingly, is in second place on views at 33%. Newsgator online, a feature fantastic service long plagued with deal-breaking performance problems, is trailing in third place with a mere %3 of views.  The company’s desktop feed readers, NetNewsWire and FeedDemon, probably have a much larger percentage of views as they are older, more stable products.  Newsgator is also the only one of the top feed readers in the chart with an enterprise feed reading product, which is undoubtedly the company’s focus – though the enterprise market has been slow to adopt RSS. (Update: NNW and FeedDemon sync up with Newsgator online and thus are counted here – which is a bad sign. For the record, I prefer NetNewsWire and Netvibes used together.) (UpdateX2: Newsgator’s Greg Reinacker contests much of this report and says that Feedburner’s stats in this report are very limited.)

Other interesting numbers when it comes to views are that Netvibes and Live.com are the only Start Pages that register on the charts.  Netvibes, tellingly, scores three times higher than Microsoft’s Live.com – which is supposed to be the StartPage for computer users everywhere.

Clicks

The second statistic offered by FeedBurner this morning is click throughs.  I don’t believe that statistic means much at all – some publishers don’t offer full feeds and require a click through to read the full text of an item but the most lovable ones don’t.  The difference in user behavior between a StartPage like MyYahoo and a full text reader like Google, Bloglines or Newsgator makes comparing click throughs between these two classes of readers a matter of apples and oranges.  Unsurprisingly, MyYahoo drives the majority of all RSS click throughs (54%) – MyYahoo has a huge user base and there’s no other way to read anything in the service other than clicking through.  Google Reader is in second place, probably as a consequence of its huge numbers and engagement via views.

Feed Diversity

The final statistic in the report is the percentage of FeedBurner’s active feeds are subscribed to by each user agent.  At 76%, Google Reader users clearly subscribe to the widest breadth of feeds from FeedBurner.  MyYahoo is in third place behind Bloglines in this metric at 51% – that means that 49% of FeedBurner published feeds don’t have a single MyYahoo reader.  Firefox Live Bookmarks and IE 7 score a 33% and 21% respectively.  In other words, browser based feed reading isn’t very substantial and it isn’t very diverse.

Conclusions

What sorts of RSS user behavior isn’t being measured here?  There’s no recognition of mobile feed reading, possibly in part because most of the products available on the market are generally anemic and little used.  It’s also important to remember that there are many types of feeds that aren’t being counted in this survey.  Desktop feed readers, including iTunes for media reading, isn’t included here.  FeedBurner tends to work with bog and news feeds – but there are a million other possible uses of RSS.  From search query feeds to weather information to package tracking – for all its market reach there are many important feeds that FeedBurner does not manage and thus cannot track.

The truth is though that RSS use is still in its infancy and the vast majority of use cases are likely covered in FeedBurner’s analysis.  This report makes me hunger for more data over time.  

The most immediate message here though may be that when it comes to reader engagement and sheer numbers, Google Reader has come from no where and is now indisputable champion in this market.  Bloglines and to some degree MyYahoo are important and Netvibes is doing admirably.  Everyone else is a relatively minor player in the web based consumer feed reading market.

Feedburner has been silent on this, but two of their investors, Brad Feld from Mobius Venture Capital and Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, blogged about it.

In his post Brad says Feedburner is testing a few networks, and Fred suggests sewing, garage music and scuba diving as examples of possible topice.

There are currently 17 feeds included in the VC network, listed here. The goal from a publishers perspective is to gain readers (and I assume a subscriber to the network counts in each of their individual feed counts), as well as advertising revenue, which Feedburner is now selling into feeds at reasonable CPMs (but, as I know from experience, very low sell through rates). The page linked above also lists total subscribers on those blogs. It’s not clear if they are double counting duplicate subscribers across multiple blogs or not.

The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control – in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible. I know this from personal experience.

Our previous posts on Feedburner are here.

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 night, Steve Olechowski, Feedburner’s COO, said that they have been looking to build or buy a web analytics product to complement their existing RSS analytics tools. Steve expects full integration of the Blogbeat service with Feedburner by Q4 of this year. At that point Feedburner customers will have the ability to see web and RSS statistics for their blogs in a single dashboard.

Terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Blogbeat’s founder, Jeff Turner, has joined Feedburner and will run the web analytics group.

ChicagoCrime.org, the freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago, is one of the original Google Maps mashup applications. It was created by developer Adrian Holovaty, a Chicago resident and lead developer of the Django framework. Chicagocrime.org won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and was named by the New York Times as one of 2005’s best ideas. While Chicagocrime.org has not taken funding and is not a true company, we thought it was worth highlighting for trailblazing the road for other mashups to emulate.

Coastr, the online social guide to beer, was created with the goal of connecting passionate, like-minded people and new brews and beer drinking establishments. It was created by Brian Eng of Luckymonk and is a simple application built with Ruby on Rails. Coastr allows you to register to submit your favorite beers and beer drinking locations. You can also explore, rate and comment on your favorite beers. Additionally, Coastr offers a WordPress widget that can be added to a blog to share your favorite beers with blog visitors.

ExtraTasty (TechCrunch profile here) fit nicely into the TECH cocktail theme and is a creation of skinnyCorp, which has a suite of online products including the T-Shirt design site Threadless, the independent music site 15 Megs of Fame and Naked and Angry. ExtraTasty is a user-generated drink recipe website featuring tagging, drink submission via the site and text message, in addition to a drink rating system and comments. An interesting feature is the interactive drink measurement scale, which allows you to click on a drink serving size and the scale calculates the appropriate amount of liquor to concoct the specific drink recipe.

FeedBurner, the West Loop-based feed management company, handles over 17 million subscriptions for over 200,000 publishers. FeedBurner has a host of interesting products including feed metrics packages for messaging feed readership. The TechCrunch feed is managed by FeedBurner, which has over 80,000 subscribers. FeedBurner has also has been positioning itself to be a targeted feed advertising option. Leveraging FeedFlare technology, FeedBurner has been able to insert advertisements under content items back on websites. Think of it as an ad network for feeds and sites, which makes FeedBurner an attractive acquisition target.

Gritwire is a creation of Dizpersion Technologies and was previously reviewed on TechCrunch. It offers a number of useful tools including MyGritwire, a flash-based feed aggregator with a built-in podcast and video player, as well as social networking features which allow you to add contacts, recommend and rate feed content. Gritwire recently launched a new feature called GritLists. Gritlists allow you to create an editorialized reading list. Other users can subscribe to your list through the Gritwire aggregator. Just in time for TECHcocktail, Gritwire released Gritlist Badges, which allow you to post your latest reading list on your own blog, website, MySpace or Friendster profile page.

Naymz is an online identity aggregator created by Tom Drugan and four others all formerly of Orbitz. Naymz allows you to aggregate links to all of your personal online content (blogs, photos, social networking profiles, news articles, resumes, etc.) onto one Naymz page. This personal aggregation, or personal Naymz page, will then be optimized for search engine findability for anyone looking to find you via search. The company has five employees and has taken an angel investment of $250,000. Sometimes it is easier to just say just “Google me” rather than dropping a phone number or email address and that is where products like Naymz could come in handy — especially as more people create online identities via blogs, photos or online videos.

RipIt Digital, a music conversion service founded by Greg Frost, converts CDs, cassettes and LPs into digital formats and loads the music onto your iPod, MP3 player or media server. RipIt Digital saves the consumer the time and hassle of ripping music and has similar services to ReadyToPlay.com and GetDigitalInc.com. RipIt Digital has bootstrapped its way to converting more than 2,000 gigabytes of music over the course of one year.

TableTop Interactive brings to together television and the web by turning tables at your sports bar or restaurant into an entertainment control center. Each device is always connected to servers, providing live sports scores and updates linked to a DirecTV sports feed. You can check up on news, play touchscreen games, compete against people at your location and across the country in trivia and fantasy sports, and order drinks and food right from your table at your favorite sports bar. It is like a super remote control so you can watch the game you want to watch, right at your seat. TableTop turned on its first units at Players Sports Bar in San Diego last month. TableTop has an interesting business model, which includes selling the actual devices, monthly service fees, a 50/50 split with any game revenue, and TableTop owners are entitled to 25% of the advertising slots on the system for use to either promote their bar or restaurant or to sell to third parties.

ZapTix, an online community ticketing site created by Christian Perry, recently launched in beta. Since the service is a young beta, and is two weeks from launch thus it is light on ticketing content and has a few wrinkles, but they should be ironed out in the beta period. ZapTix is looking to bring community theaters ticketing to the Internet. In true bootstrapping style the whole company was set up on less than $10,000 by outsourcing every step of the development process and hiring no full-time employees.

Look for more partnerships like this from Feedburner over time. Details on the partnership are here.