Hello? Hellooooo?

Hello? Hellooooo?

Hello? Hellooooo?
Hi there. You may be looking in your feed reader every day and thinking "Another no-news-'bout-FeedBurner day." You may be starting to think, "Are they still in there? In the FeedBurner bubble, burning the feeds? Did somebody maybe shut off their connection to the Tubes?" You may be thinking that or worse. We have some good news, and some just newsy news.

First, the good news. We are totally still here, burning the feeds, writing the checks (that's some sweet cursive Giuliana's wielding), and analyzing the analytics.

Next, the newsy news, aka "what we did over summer and winter and spring vacation." If you are looking for juicy announcements, this section is NOT for you. This is more like the academic paper section of the post, except for the fact it lacks erudition and other big vocabulary words. We have been and are busy integrating FeedBurner into a more Googley way of life. This Googley way of life is very different on the backend architecture side, so the team has been busy both scaling and maintaining the existing environment, while simultaneously rewriting the system to act like one of the cool kids in the more Googley (Googly? Can we get a ruling on this one?) architecture world.

So, if you're a publisher, a good next question is "Um, why are you doing this again?" The answers are numerous, so let's itemize a few of them:

Full integration with Google. Integration makes it possible to connect with other Google offerings. For example, only a fraction of our publishers have had the opportunity to participate in the FeedBurner Ad Network to date. We would like to offer this capability to an order of magnitude more publishers, and full integration into Google architecture will make this not just a possibility but a likelihood (more on this in the next couple months).
More and better services. As any Mies Van der Rohe fan will tell you, "more is more." By getting our systems fully integrated into a Google architecture, it will be easier for us to provide some services we've long envisioned but have never really been able to provide because of scale challenges. These include but are not limited to parameterized feeds (e.g., think feeds of query results), a wider variety of email services (those of you wishing to import legitimate-yet-massive email lists know what we mean), and other stuff. And by "stuff," we mean "things."
Easier to scale as load on the system increases. As more feeds are burned and are hit by more kinds of feed reading bots and readers and API's and crawlers, even feeds that don't have new subscribers see increased activity. Full integration into Google will mean an easier time working through performance and scalability bottlenecks, which means the engineering resources now hard at work on scaling can move on to enhancing services.
Why not build new services and integrate at the same time? There are lots of opinions about the best way to go through integrations. Our perspective is that the time you lose trying to continuously merge an updated legacy codebase with a new rewrite causes you be in a world of never actually getting the integration done because you're constantly working on merge problems, which gives you less time to add new features OR get the new backend integration done, and eventually you kind of grind to a halt, much like Achilles trying to catch the Tortoise in Zeno's paradox. We're confident, in fact, that Zeno would have used software integration to illustrate his paradox had he lived in less pre-Socratic times. Anyhoo, we decided to bite the bullet and go full-on integration (while maintaining the existing environment) as much as possible, knowing that it would mean few new features or capabilities while we went on our backend integration journey. So, while we have continued to add hundreds of thousands of new publishers and feeds, you haven't heard a lot from us despite a lot of hard work. It's not really that exciting to post "Soon, you will have everything you used to have, only it will look different to the people working on it here!"

There are lots of lots of product integration points that we know people would like to see, and we are looking forward to those as well. These opportunities are not lost on some of the brighter students at Google, and believe me, there are some real brainiacs around here. We keep whispering to each other in the hallways, "What if they find out we're stupid?"

On the customer side, we have been signing up new publishers right and left (or left and right, depending on whether you live in the northern or southern hemisphere), and in fact, our publisher services team is busier than ever. We used to announce all of these new publishers, but it's a bit less exciting to announce customers that are already customers of other parts of the company without feeling like the kids in school who are the last ones to do everything. (Simulated conversation. FeedBurner: "Hey, we just burned our millionth feed!" Search: "It's cute how they still get excited about numbers in the millions.")