As a follow-up to my posts on Web Analytics (cf Part 1 and Part 2), here is a quick update on FeedBurner. As a reminder, FeedBurner enables a blogger to track his off-site traffic, i.e. his subscribers. FeedBurner gives you a feed URL that replaces the blogging site's default RSS feed and on which it performs extra monitoring and analytics --it basically answers the question of how many subscribers a blog has.
Since the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google in 2007, users were expecting / hoping a closer integration of FeedBurner with Google's family of products targeted at publishers and advertizers --Google Analytics to start with. Nothing happened in 2008 but things have now started to move. Since the Christmas break, the http://feedburner.google.com/ URL is up-n-running and one can start moving his FeedBurner account & feed to a Google account. Which I did earlier this week.
The migration was very smooth. You simply log into http://www.feedburner.com/, follow a few links to get the migration started and you eventually receive an email notification when it completes. It took about 5 to 10 minutes for my 2 feeds --the entries and comments of Openomics. Google offered me to update my feeds using the feeds2.feedburner.com domain --was feeds.feedburner.com-- which I did not do, but it all works fine still --subscriptions are being redirected from the old to the new domain.
So, good job Google! The only noticeable difference, as shown in Figure 1 above, is that the FeedBurner Stats Dashboard --the plot of subscribers & reach over time-- moved from being histogram-based to a solid-line graph --to align with the graphical standards of Google Analytics, I am guessing.