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Google updating FeedBurner infrastructure, email subscriptions going away

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.”

So what is changing? 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. 

However, FeedBurner will no longer support email subscription management. Following that deprecation, Blogger’s FollowByEmail widget will also stop working. Google advises affected users to download their email subscribers and migrate to third-party replacement offerings. In general, the company “will be turning down most non-core feed management features.”

Google will start the FeedBurner infrastructure migration in July, but email data will remain available for download after that:

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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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com

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