Feedburner and the Future of RSS
What does the future hold for Feedburner?
Feedburner is living on borrowed time, at least that’s the consensus from the average tech blogger. Still smarting over the shut down of Google Reader most hardcore RSS feed followers are starting to question what Google has in store for one of its least cared for services.
Almost every other Google service has been rebranded, streamlining a new look across dozens of individual services… but not Feedburner. Sitting sadly on the sidelines this very popular service has been politely ignored up until this point, but this only begs the question of when Google’s benevolence will run out. How much time does Feedburner have left?
Honestly, no one knows. It could be 6 months, it could be a year. It could be more, or it could be less. Google’s goals have been shifting more and more towards monetization and Feedburner is a free service that Google may not be able to milk for any sort of profit, and this will surely spell it’s doom sooner or later. In the mean time hundreds of thousands of blogs, perhaps even millions, use the service and could be decimated if it is shut down in the same fashion as Google Reader was this year.
The future is bright for RSS
Even if Feedburner does eventually go down, the driving force behind it (RSS) will not. In fact, RSS seems to be going stronger than ever before with millions of blogs being syndicated and fed through various readers.
Almost all blogs (WordPress, Blogger, etc) come with a built-in RSS feed. The trouble with these is that unless you know what you’re doing they can be difficult to work with and get people to subscribe to. Services like Feedburner are trusted well-known names and this is part of what draws people to them.
If you are using such a service to publish your feed that’s great! Simply follow the directions in this blog post on Dashburst to ensure that should your chosen service go down you can easily re-publish your feed through another service without a major loss of blog subscribers.
If this is not something that you feel comfortable doing on your own, give us a call or send us an email and we would be more than happy to take a look at your blog and your RSS feed for you. We’re more than just designers here at Webnovation!
Comments:
What do you think? Do you use RSS to syndicate your blog or to publish content from another blog to your website?
