I’m a Feedburner fan, and I’ve blogged about the service in the past, but for a long time it looked like FB was going to be just another Google acquisition that was swallowed into the Google void never to be heard from again.

This weekend, users of the service were alerted that they can combine their existing Feedburner accounts with their Google account. It involved logging in, setting up your account and waiting while Google moves your feeds over to their new system.

For me, the conversion went rather quickly and you’ll need to log out (if you checked remember me) and log in with your Google Account.

At first glance, things look relatively the same. There are a few new features in the email management area, including exporting users, but it’s still missing key tools like an import.

There are also some improved graphs and other tracking tools. Here’s a sample screenshot – gone is the bar graph approach they previously used and now you get a nice chart of subscribers and reach over time.

A few things I’ve noticed in the transition. First, your subscriber counts will pretty much disappear. Feeds of mine that I know have 1,000 subscribers are showing 200 and 300. Google says it may take up to a week to get this all straightened out.

One other thing to be aware of – the URL of your feeds will change once you convert your feeds. Google will make sure the previous address still works, but going forward your addresses will read:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/highedwebtech

It’d probably be a good idea to find places where you have RSS feeds linked and change them over.

Finally, here’s a more detailed FAQ from Google on other changes.

One of Feedburner’s best features is it’s email subscriptions services. It handles user subscriptions, unsubscribe requests and lets you customize the look of the emails that get sent out. Basically, it’s the perfect RSS to Email platform. Set it and forget it. Each day, it dutifully sends out an email with my RSS headlines to on and off-campus users. It’s so great I want to use it send our intranet headlines to everyone on my campus. I’ve got the OK from administration and I want to get this project done.

So I started researching if Feedburner would let me import email addresses for my campus users. For a bit of time, Feedburner would allow you send a file to them and they would import email addresses for you. It’s a bit more work then just letting people do it themselves, but I can imagine that would lead to a spam avalanche for Feedburner. So, they stopped accepting email list imports.

During that time, they got acquired by Google. I’m sure they enjoyed a nice payday and the reliability of Google’s architecture, but the downside is that innovation and development on new features has pretty much dried up, similar to Google’s many other acquisitions (Grand Central, DodgeBall, Jaiku, etc.) The email list import is the biggest request by users on the support forums, and the answer seems to vary between “soon” to “sometime this month” to “never.”

I want to use Feedburner to send my emails. I’ve tried other services like Feedblitz and the emails lack the elegance of Feedburner. No offense, FeedBlitz, but setting up an account in your system was a hassle and the customization options were confusing. Feedburner is 10x more simple. Look at these emails and tell me which one looks more elegant and easier to read and understand.

Feedburner:

An email from Feedburner.

FeedBlitz:

An email from Feedblitz

Help me, Feedburner. Please, I beg you, let me import my users into your system. I will pay you for this functionality. I don’t have the time to spend trying to figure out how to make FeedBlitz look presentable. If anyone at Feedburner reads this, please email me.

Does anyone else out there have suggestions of services to check out, seeing as how FB will probably not get back to me? Thank you in advance.

Since 2003, I’ve been publishing a ton of RSS feeds at the college where I work. Since 2005, I believe, I’ve been using Feedburner to help distrubute my RSS feeds. Here’s why.

First, Feedburner takes the load off you. If your feeds get popular at all, you’ll notice how often clients will poll your feed for updates. I was seeing clients updating every two minutes! By off-loading that to Feedburner, I don’t have to worry about the bandwidth. Here’s a quick graph showing the growth of just our news and events feed:

Second, the email subscription feature has been a huge hit on my campus. We’re offering it now for many feeds including our campus news and events, athletics, and many more. I could write a whole post about just their email delivery service (and someday will), but I’m using it with the college as well as another site I run and it’s drop-dead simple. Users opt-in, you style the email, add your logo and decide when the email will be delivered each day. Feedburner manages unsubscribes, which is very convenient, and will show you a list of your subscribers, including data on if they haven’t verified or their address is bad. You can see an example of an email subscription box here.

Third, Feedburner will ping a ton of web services for you to let them know you’ve updated your website. I think that’s awfully nice of them, and saves you the hassle of trying to manage that in your CMS or blogging software.

Fourth, stats. Feedburner has always been able to track how many are subscribed to your feed, and what they click on, but with their acquisition by Google, many of the for-pay services have been opened up, including more serious stats and tracking. That’s good data for us web devs to have and examine.

Fifth, Feedburner makes re-purposing your content very easy. They will make widgets for inclusion in your email, your blog, your MySpace, wherever you want to put it. One of my favorite uses is the graphical option. Here are two examples of this.

First, we have a web-based Rideboard here on campus. It’s cool enough for an entire post, but for now we’ll stick to the Feedburner part of it. We offer, of course, RSS feeds for each city so you can subscribe and get a feed of rides going to and from Cleveland, for example. We wanted to publicize this in a weekly email we send to students detailing upcoming weekend events on campus. I couldn’t import the RSS feed directly into the email or write some PHP to query the MySQL database, so I turned to Feedburner. I sent it a custom feed I created and had it create an animated GIF with my RSS feed headlines. You can use FB’s default styles, or you can upload and use your own graphic. Here’s the one I made:

What’s great about this is I don’t have to update this every time a new ride is posted, and there’s no action required by me when the email goes out. I also don’t have to worry about having stale content in that feed when the email goes out, because each time the image is called by an email client, they’ll see the most up-to-date rides available in there. Here’s an ErieBlogs.com Job Board example:

Finally, Feedburner makes it easy to splice together info from other sites, such as your social bookmarks and your Flickr photos into your feed. This is nice if you want to throw in the occasional campus shot into your feed.

I’m a fan of outsourcing web tasks to make life easier, and Feedburner is a great one-stop-shop for all your RSS needs. There’s so much more they do, I recommend going to the site to see it all. I didn’t even mention their podcasting and media enclosure support, or their ad network. Go!