San Francisco — Believe it or not, Google has not forgotten about Feedburner. Around three and a half years ago, Google made what appears to be a pretty big $100 million acquisition: FeedBurner, the RSS analytics service just got its first big update since coming under the Google umbrella.
The new beta version of FeedBurner has received an experimental new program that better corresponds with Google Analytics and looks like it might actually integrate into other Google AdSense and Webmaster tools. It certainly looks prettier, with a nice, comprehensive dashboard showing relevant traffic stats and any service interruptions in your feeds. The real improvements have happened under the hood, though.
If you visit FeedBurner today, you will be greeted with a “Try out our NEW (beta) version!” message in the top menu. Clicking on this will take you to the new version. The new Home page is bundled with overview stats and alerts for the sites you run. But the real key, of course, is in the Feeds area.
Here is you will see a completely new way of looking at your subscribers and data. In a move that should surprise no one, it looks a lot more like Google Analytics. But the key is what is going on behind the scenes. As Google notes: As news has gone real-time, so has FeedBurner. it now tracks incoming traffic from Twitter and feed readers as it happens. PubSubHubbub users — which is just about everyone on a major blogging service, these days — who use FeedBurner Socialize to publish to Twitter will start receiving stats coming in the moment they hit publish.
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The new application does not work for every component of Feedburner — if you need to access feed management or change certain settings, you can continue to use the old interface. The new interface — which is accessible via feedburner.google.com/gfb/ — shows real-time stats for clicks, views and podcast downloads from across your feeds.
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The stats garner a lot of the information that used to be spread across multiple panels and put it into one interface. You can also view the last two hours of activity for a feed to see different waves of traffic and click-throughs. Additionally, the new Feedburner dashboard also has a new message center that displays notices if there are any problems with a feed or other things that you need to know.
Certainly, with these new real-time tools and the enhanced application are the start of some real thrust behind the Feedburner product. RSS might be going out of favor in a world of Facebook, Twitter and mobile apps, but publishers still need a central place to control and manage their content streams. Feedburner no longer does everything publishers need it to do, but there just are not a lot of alternatives.