Tutorial : FeedBurner

FeedBurner is a web feed management provider launched in 2004.FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers. Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis and an optional advertising system. Though it initially was not clear whether advertising would be well-suited to the RSS format, authors now choose to include advertising in two-thirds of FeedBurner's feeds.

Published feeds are modified in several ways, including automatic links to Digg and del.icio.us, and "splicing" information from multiple feeds. 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.

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

On August 15, 2008, Google completed migration of Feedburner into its group of services. Publishers who have completed migration will access Feedburner via feedburner.google.com

Blocking

Although the main page is accessible and one can use its APIs, the actual feeds generated by Feedburner are blocked in Mainland China. This decision could have been made in order to make users choose the Chinese alternative FeedSky or due to the fact that one could use Feedburner to access content from blocked blogs.