What happen to the FeedBurner? Why need to migrate my account to Google? Why need to do it within a month? All right, give me a few minutes, I will explain all of them to you.
As most of you already know, FeedBurner has been acquired by Google since June 1, 2007 (you can see the acquisition in FeedBurner website front page). Since the acquisition, FeedBurner has been working to move their application to Google hardware, software and data centers. This allows FeedBurner’s application to integrate easily with Google’s platforms and other applications. According to FeedBurner, their vision is to bring the best of what FeedBurner offered in syndication publisher tools and solutions to the AdSense platform, and vice versa.
In order to make the integration happen successfully, it’s necessary to handle FeedBurner applications and solutions via Google account. They’re planning to move all accounts by next month February 28, 2009. They will make the necessary efforts to notify you about the migration. Be sure to sign in to your FeedBurner account regularly to ensure you will be notified. If you don’t receive such notification, perhaps the best way is to inform FeedBurner or Google. I will let you know the contact information at the end of this post. If you don’t move your feeds to Google account, your feeds will stop working after February 28, 2009.
What To Expect After Migration?
There’re several new features available as part of the migration. But there’re two features will be retired after account transition.
AdSense For Feeds
As mentioned in the vision of the FeedBurner, all publishers with AdSense enabled account are allowed to participate in AdSense for feeds. This new feature will help you to make money from your loyalty audience that reads your feed regularly. If you already have Google account, you can enable your AdSense here.
Feed Via Email
The feed delivery via email has also been greatly enhanced. The email sending is now part of the Google platform sharing same email engine as other Google products. You’re able to search or page through your email subscriber list easily. Perhaps FeedBurner can enhance the feature by allowing us to customize the email template to align with the brand image of our blog.
Infrastructure
Since the new FeedBurner is sharing same hardware infrastructure with other Google products, it’s much more scalable and fault-tolerant. Your feed content will be stored in multiple Google data centers where your subscribers are able to access your feed even one of the Google data center or Internet backbone is down.
Visitor Tracking
This is one of the feature that will be retired from your new Google FeedBurner account. The reason is Google already has a same product which is Google Analytics. It’s a very good product in visitor analysis which is able to generate details report for you to understand visitor behavior. You can sign up here using same Google account. The bad thing is it does not provide you real-time data.
FeedBurner Networks
FeedBurner Networks, which were integrated with FeedBurner Ad Network, are no longer being developed or supported. This is due to the less usage and popularity. They will spend their efforts on developing inventory grouping as part of the AdSense platform.
Migration Risk
In any data or account migration in IT industry, there will be at least some risks involved. I’ve been involved in several complicated rewards system data migration in past few days. So I fully understand how complicated FeedBurner has to consider each of the scenario during the migration planning and execution. Of course, nobody can say he or she has 100% confident that migration will be successful. The key point is you need to have responsive support to troubleshoort all the issues reported. I believe Google and FeedBurner has take into consideration and make our life easier.
Will I Lose My Subscribers In This Process?
FeedBurner claims that you should not lose any loyalty readers of your feed during this process. All feeds.feedburner.com URLs will be redirected to new feed URL hosted by Google. Your subscribers will continue to receive feed contents using existing feed URLs. However, the reporting function may take up to a week to adjust the changes, so the number of subscribers you see in analytics report may be lower for a short period of time. Besides, the algothrims used to calculate subscriber number is different after migration which is claimed to be more accurate. I hope this will not affect you too much. If you lose your subscribers or can’t see the feed content after the process, just head down to Google Help Group to ask for help. Their engineer will look into your issue.
MyBrand
After transferring your account to Google, you will be sent an email with instructions on how to change MyBrand. Basically, you will be required to change your DNS name to Google hosted domain service. After your change, the new DNS will take up to 1 day to propagate to other server in the world. During this transition period, your service might be affected.
Step By Step Migration Guide
#1 Step: Check For FeedBurner Migration Message
After you sign in to your existing FeedBurner account, you should be able to see the message at the top of the page, “Hey! We are moving FeedBurner accounts to Google. Learn more or Move your account now.”. If you don’t see it, just wait for a few days or you can’t check with Google here. So what you need to do now is click at the “Move your account now” link.
#2 Step: Create Google Account
In this step, you will be asked to create Google account if you don’t have one. So just choose an option and click ‘Next’.
#3 Step: Move Feeds To Your Google Account
Click ‘Move feeds’ to move your feed from FeedBurner to your Google account.
#4 Step: Moving Feeds In Progress
FeedBurner will show you a screen message indicating that your feeds moving is in progress. You can simply close this screen as they’re moving your feeds in the backend of the system without depending on this screen. After it’s completed, you’ll receive an email. From now on, you should sign in to your FeedBurner using new URL and new Google account, http://feedburner.google.com. After completing the process, your new feed address should look something like this “http://feeds2.feedburner.com/YourBlogName”. Some of you might have “http://feedproxy.google.com/YourBlogName” as the feed URL but the Google engineer claimed that feeds2 should be the final address as part of this migration campaign. Anyway, I still like “feedproxy.google.com” address more. Your subscribers can continue to use existing feed URL without any change. FeedBurner will redirect your readers from old feed URL to new feed URL.
#5 Step: Enable AdSense And Analytics
If you’d like to have feed advertising and visitor tracking and analysis tools, please enable them by going to the following URL using your Google account.
Google AdSense: http://www.google.com/adsense/
Google Analytics: http://www.google.com/analytics/
Resource
#1 Transferring FeedBurner Accounts to Google Accounts FAQ
https://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=126303
Here is the good place to find out basic FAQ regarding migration of your FeedBurner account to Google account.
#2 FeedBurner Help Group
http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner
In case you’ve any question or issue during the migration, you can always go here to ask for help. The people from Google will look at your issue and respond back to you once it’s resolved.
Conclusion
The migration process is not difficult. All you need to do is creating a Google account if you don’t have it and follow on-screen instructions to move your data to Google account. In case you have any issue during the process, you can always go to FeedBurner Help Group to ask for help.
Have you migrated your FeedBurner to Google account? You’re welcome to share your experience with us if you’ve done so.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Just browse through the trend in Twitter, there are lots of people unhappy about the FeedBurner account migration. Are FeedBurner and Google engineers consider hard enough to cover most of the migration scenarios? Seems the answer is no. What do you think?
Lots of problems and no answers from Google. My migration did not complete and now I’m out of luck. So disgusted.
@Kathy,
Personally I feel that FeedBurner was doing better before Google acquisition. Now seems like Google is not putting enough resources in running FeedBurner.
Bey — You’re right. They’re not and it shows. UPDATE: I got a message from Google that my feeds were finally fixed. I don’t know exactly which pleading message, in which venue, was the impetus for the fix. Just glad they finally got to me. What a nightmare, though.
@Kathy,
It’s great to hear good news from you.
Thanks! I’m happy to report good news. But, wow. It took me moving heaven and earth to get them to respond. I pity the others who had my problem and are STILL not getting any help. What a shame.
Have a good day! (I know I will!)
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