FeedBurner starts to close, sadly ads now more important than feed management

The official FeedBurner blog is closing its doors as part of the closure of FeedBurner following its acquisition by Google in 2007.

Users have already for some time been able to swap into the Google version of Feedburner and forced switches are now on their way.

It’s sad to see FeedBurner go. I wasn’t always a fan, particularly back in the day when you were forced to give up control of your feed. They got better over time, and today they’ve become an essential part of mine, and many others blogging experience.

What Google plans to do next still isn’t clear, for example the Google backend is identical to FeedBurner so far, but you’d presume that’s going to change. What concerns me more though is the name of the Google Product: Adsense for Feeds. FeedBurner was never about the ads; sure they did offer them and many swore that they offered the best in the business. Google canceled FeedBurner’s advertising program for Adsense, perhaps unsurprisingly. FeedBurner was all about feed management: knowing how many subscribers you had, what they were clicking on, and offering additional features such as email subscription and the ability to easily add additional information (“feed flare”) into a feed via a few clicks.

The new produce sounds like it might simply be all about the ads, and little about feed management, and that’s not a change for the better.

I’m stuck on FeedBurner feeds and not about to change them, but there’s got to be a market opportunity here for a startup to offer a FeedBurner like service.

Vale FeedBurner, we will miss you.