Will Google Stop FeedBurner Service in 2013??

There has been a lot of talk regarding FeedBurner recently. FeedBurner is a widely known email and RSS subscription service used by a lot of bloggers, chiefly because it's a free service. A couple or so months ago, many bloggers raised concerns when FeedBurner showed a subscriber count of zero for their blog. Since then, rumor has it that Google is shutting down the FeedBurner service in 2013 (probably for good, but we can't say anything yet). So is it true? And what would become of its users if it is? Indeed, the shutting-down of such a widely used service could prove to be a mistake on Google's part.

Well  from the looks of it, this rumor is only half true. The 'half-true' part is the keyword here though. Google is not completely shutting down the whole service. It has only shut down FeedBurner APIs. We'll talk more about them later in this post

Why Google Shuts down products?

To see if Google can really shut down FeedBurner, we first need to look at why Google shuts down products in the first place. A couple of months back, Matt Cutts uploaded a video, in which he discloses why Google will shut down some products. Long story short, there can be various reasons. The most obvious one is resource limitation. As big as Google appears to be, it still does not have unlimited resources. And if a project is consuming too much resource without replenishing them, then it has to be shut down.

Google will also shut down products that are outdated. For example, Orkut got outdated quite a while ago, so it had to be shut down to make room for the likes of Buzz and Google+.

So the next question is, is FeedBurner worthless to Google?

How Google sees FeedBurner?

Okay, first thing's first. FeedBurner is used by a lot of bloggers out there, chiefly because it's free. Given Google's excellent profile, it seems pretty unreasonable that they'd shut the service down. Now I am not claiming I know how they think, but one thing is for sure. If Google was to shut down FeedBurner without at least a fair warning (and we've seen none of those), then it'd leave a lot of bloggers pretty pissed off. Not that Google cares on whit about how they feel, but it sure would be a bad business decision, as there's a lot of competition out there, waiting for Google to make a slip so they could benefit from it.



Secondly, most of Google's services are free (like FeedBurner), such as Google AdSense, Blogger, Webmaster Tools, Google+, and so on. If they were to shut down one free product, it would cast a shadow of doubt over other free products as well, and the reliability of these products in the future would be jeopardized. After all, if one service can shut down, who can say the others won't follow suit?

So what is the problem?

Google has apparently ran into problems regarding the FeedBurner API. The first signs were when the feed count was reset to zero, even though no one lost a single subscriber. So only the counter had problems. Although this glitch was resolved, other back-end problems still remained. As a result, Google eventually decided that it didn't want developers using their its API after all. (Note: An API lets a developer interact with a program. He can use an API to get user data, call functions, and do other such stuff).



Hence, although FeedBurner is still working, its API has been disabled by Google. You can see this from the fact that your subscriber count on BuySellAds is not being updated if you're using FeedBurner. This is because the API is no longer to BSA for fetching user data.

So what's next?

Nothing much :P. You should be able to use FeedBurner (apparently) for now without any problems. But it would be a good idea to back-up your subscriber list from FeedBurner (we did a post on that recently).



You might also look into alternative solutions, such as AWeber, FeedBlitz, and so on. We will do posts on them soon, so stay tuned. And keep reading and sharing :)

How to Backup your FeedBurner Email Subscribers List Safely?

FeedBurner is a widely-used email subscription service, and unless you're on a premium service such as Aweber, chances are that you are using FeedBurner as well. For some, FeedBurner might be everything they need. But for more advanced bloggers out there, some premium services seem to offer a lot more features. And the fact that FeedBurner ran into problems a couple or so months ago doesn't go very well in its favor either. Whatever the case though, it is always a good idea to back things up. Whether you want to move your subscribers to another service, or you just want to make a backup, you will need to download your FeedBurner subscriber list. Here, we'll tell you how to backup your FeedBurner Email Subscribers list.

FeedBurner isn't so renowned with reason. It has many features to offer, such as subscription management, email branding, customizable delivery and communication preferences, and a lot more. You can view and sort your subscriber list, activate/deactivate and delete individual emails, and receive emails when people unsubscribe. Besides, it has the export option, so you can export your list to excel or .csv format.

Downloading your FeedBurner email subscribers

To start off, log into your FeedBurner account. FeedBurner previously had problems displaying subscriber counts, but it seems to be all right for most people now. Just click on the blog name for which you want to backup your subscriber list.

You will then be directed to a dashboard. Click on the Publicize tab in your dashboard.

Under the publicize tab, you will see an option for Email Subscriptions in the left sidebar. Once you click it, you will see some further options. Now click on Subscription Management.

Now, you can see the number of your email subscribers. When you first log into FeedBurner, what you see is the total number of your subscribers for both email and RSS combined. But what you need is just your email subscribers' list, and not RSS subscribers' list. On the Subscription Management page, if you scroll down all the way to the bottom, you will see the number of your Total Subscribers, which only counts your email subscribers.

If you click on the View Subscriber Details option (shown in the picture above), you will options to export the list.

Just click on Export: CSV, and you're done! You will be prompted to save a file, which contains all your email subscribers. You can do whatever with this file; either store it on your computer, or upload it to a cloud storage, your call.

In the meantime, if you have questions, feel free to ask. Good luck :)