Feedburner turns 10 in 2014

Are you feeling lucky? Google Feedburner has been lucky enough to stick around for 10 years, an eternity for a company that doesn't even list this product on its company history timeline (https://www.google.com/about/company/history/).

Because of Feedburner, you are receiving this newsletter to your personal email. You had to visit SeeCalifornia.com,  fill out a form, then confirm your subscription in an automated email sent to you. We've used Feedburner's free service since 2008 and have enjoyed the fact that it is free--but there have been stressful moments along the way. Several days it hasn't delivered the emails, quite often it has dropped subscribers, and to sign up can be quite challenging. Over 50% would-be subscribers don't check their spam folders for the message that they must click on to subscribe.

Google has discontinued all support for this product so each day brings the possibility that could just end suddenly and you won't receive the daily emails. Many frantic bloggers and businesses with thousands of subscribers have deserted Feedburner because they couldn't afford to risk losing their client base should Feedburner cease to exist. In our instance, we've researched the options and discovered it could cost us up to $100/month to continue this email signup with another company. For now, we do daily backups of the email list of subscribers so we can migrate to another service if we decide on that course of action.

Feedburner is a web feed management provider launched in 2004 by several guys such as Dick Costolo, who became CEO of Twitter in 2010. It was acquired by Google in June 2007 for the rumored price of $100 million (Dick and his friends made a tidy sum for their invention!) Other companies have formed and charge fees for the service that Google provided for free. Among them are Feedblitz. Mailchimp also offers a similar feed delivery which is free if you send out less than a certain number of emails per month. You are charged fees based on the number of emails you send with Mailchimp.