FEEDBURNER

FeedBurner is a news feed management provider launched in 2004.^[1] FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers. Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis ^[2] and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format,^[3] authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner's feeds.^[4] Published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, and "splicing" information from multiple feeds.^[5] FeedBurner is a typical Web 2.0 service, providing web service application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow other software to interact with it. As of October 5, 2007, FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds for 584,832 publishers, including 142,534 podcast and videocast feeds.^[6]

On June 3, 2007 FeedBurner was acquired by Google Inc., for a rumored price of $100 million.^[7] One month later, two of their popular PRO services (MyBrand and TotalStats) were made free to everyone.^[8]