Tuesday, December 23, 2008
google absorbs feedburner and loses some nice features in the process.
as pointed out in the last feedburner blog post, and the first "googleburner" blog post, the assimilation of feedburner by google is nearly complete.
but wait - there's more -
no more feedburner "site stats". this is really a shame, since it provided simple lightweight analytics without having to go into the full google analytics thing. i think it's a real loss, because it is not the same thing, and takes more work to implement ga. shame on google. - and why are they changing the damn domain names ? does it have to be "something.google.com" for everything ? shame on google again.
- and to basically make feedburner functionality a subset of "adsense" - give me a break - feed burner was not all about money. morons. do you really want to see ads at the bottom of every post in a feed ? or every nth - or at all.
- can no longer select stats for individual headline animators, only aggregate - and the prior stats don't appear to have been moved, either.
- also lost are the optimizer options "convert format burner" [1], "event feed" [2], and "tickerize" [3], each of which had their valuable use cases.
is there anything i do like ? single sign-on - and i hope it stays signed in, like feedburner did, not this periodic forced logout nonsense that seems to be in vogue lately - "oh, pleease - protect me from myself!" i get so tired of del.icio.us now (excuse me - delicious.com - *sigh*), following yahoo's standard of two weeks logged in max.
not like there's any choice - 2009.02.28 seems to be the drop dead date for changeover. they should be more up front about the changes that require acquisition and implementation of replacement functionality, rather than burying it in their faqs.
[1] "Nine flavors of RSS and now two formats of Atom ... who has time to keep track of it all? FeedBurner does! Let us convert your feed to any of the format choices listed below."
[2] "Turn your feed from upcoming.org, Google Calendar, or other event tracking services into something more useful. This service will pick up the event date and reorder the items in your feed so that they are in event date order."
[3] "Are you publishing a financial feed or podcast? Then you should Tickerize it! Any ticker symbols that you reference in your item in parentheses like (GE) or (YHOO) will get a special element that certain financial aggregators will use to index your feed. Only US stock market symbols are supported."