Google Moving FeedBurner Infrastructure, Email Subscriptions Retiring

Google has announced that it’s moving FeedBurner to a new infrastructure but also doing away with its email subscription service.

If you’re an internet user of a certain age, chances are you used Google’s FeedBurner to manage the RSS feeds of your personal blogs and early podcasts at some point. During the Web 2.0 era, it was the de facto standard for feed management and analytics, after all.

Ever since FeedBurner lingered in an odd kind of limbo.

While Google had no qualms shutting down popular services like Google Reader in favor of its ill-fated social experiments like Google+, FeedBurner just kept burning feeds day in and day out, even as Google slowly minimized some parts of the service, most notably its advertising integrations.

FeedBurner was founded in 2004 and acquired by Google three years later to manage web feeds.

Google is moving FeedBurner to a “more stable, modern infrastructure” later this year, but email subscriptions and non-core feed management features will be shutting down.

These infrastructure changes are meant to support Feedburner’s “next chapter” – which hopefully includes a new UI to replace the very ancient one today – and Google says it “will keep the product up and running for all users.”

However, focus and support moving forward will be on core feed management functionality. For many users, no action is required. All existing feeds will continue to serve uninterrupted, and you can continue to create new accounts and burn new feeds.

This includes the “ability to change the URL, source feed, title, and podcast metadata of your feed,” as well as “basic analytics on feed requests and the ability to create enclosure tags for MP3 files.”

But in July, it is also shutting down some non-core features that don’t directly involve feed management, most importantly the FeedBurner email subscription service that allowed you to get emailed alerts when a feed updates.

Google said, “We are turning down most non-core feed management features that help you optimize and publicize your feed, e.g. email subscriptions, Browser Friendly, and Password Protector”.

Feed owners will be able to download their email subscriber lists (and will be able to do so after July, too). With that, Blogger’s FollowByEmail widget will also be retired.

Google stresses that other core FeedBurner features will remain in place, but given the popularity of email newsletters, that’s a bit of an odd move.

The tech giant concluded by saying:

“ We’re glad that these changes allow us to keep FeedBurner up and running, but we also realize that changes like these can mean extra work to find alternate solutions, which is why we wanted to inform you early. Check out the FeedBurner Help Center to learn more about the changes and next steps.”

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