At New Media Expo this past week I mentioned in my session that FeedBurner was my go-to solution for syndicating content to email (and for providing a fantastic way for people to subscribe to your feed via their own service).  After the session, I was approached in discussion by someone with some news.

Google is shutting down FeedBurner.

“I haven’t heard that,” I mentioned.  They were insistant.  So, I decided to research the rumor for myself.  And the results were pretty convincing.

A few Google Searches Later brought me to FeedBlitz, who was also at New Media Expo, and had written a fairly extensive article about it.

Some noteworthy things have happened:

• The FeedBurner API was shut down on Oct 20, 2012 – this means no outside services can pull FeedBurner analytics data
• The FeedBurner blog was shut down
• The FeedBurner twitter account was deleted
• FeedBurner.JP, the japanese version of FeedBurner.com, was abandoned by Google. This itself means that anyone who had a feeds.feedburner.jp site url has lost access to their feed, seemingly without warning.
• AdSense for Feeds is unavailable

I’ve never been one to believe rumors, but the evidence is fairly substantial to believe that a true sunsetting of the RSS service is immanent at worst, and probable at best.

So, when does the hammer fall?  To be honest, I don’t know – and no one else seems to either.  Every article I visit mentions the API shutdown as the “beginning of the end”, but nothing else has been done currently.

Granted, FeedBurner isn’t perfect, but it has served many well for a long time.

Alternatives

FeedBlitz

Feedblitz is a fantastic alternative as far as subscription helpers go, and they do so for a nominal fee per email subscribers.  That means you can forgo the email subscription and use it as a social subscription helper for free – which is a great deal.  I have, however, had great feedback from people who use FeedBlitz, and their service is top-notch.

MailChimp

MailChimp?  Yes, but not for the social aspect.  MailChimp has a very unique feature in that it allows people to automatically send out emails via an RSS feed.  It also means you can have an extremely customizable newsletter that goes out at your decision – whether that’s daily, weekly, monthly, or even bi-weekly!

My Thoughts

Do both.

Use a free (12,000 sends a month is more than enough for most bloggers), weekly newsletter along with FeedBlitz to handle analytics on the feed, and get the best of both worlds.

What do you think?  Is the writing on the wall for FeedBurner, or will you hang on until the bitter end?