Google to buy FeedBurner?

[bill]

All of the rumor mills are churning out news of Google's impeding purchase of FeedBurner. It's all rumor still, but the talk sounds pretty certain.

The question may soon be whether this acquisition will be positive for users of the service. Many people are wary of Google's far reaching influence into so many aspects of their sites. Others will embrace the combination of RSS tracking data into the massive Google advertising/promotion machine.

Do you think this purchase would benefit RSS tracking? Are there any worthwhile alternatives out there?

[Marcia]

I think such an acquisition would be a dynamite data-generating machine for Google that they'd find some very productive uses for. I understand their philosophy is that "the best data is more data."

[venice]

I'm using my feedburner account less and less, simply since I've seen the pagerank on my feed pages grow and it's not my real estate. I'd much rather see a solution similar to having analytics code added to my feed so the PR could stay closer to home, hopefully strengthening my sites overall value. No idea if that would be an option, just thinking out loud.

[bill]

I use a 302 redirect on my Feedburner feeds. The original advertised feed is on my site. It is temporarily redirected to Feedburner. If I ever have to switch services then I can just shut off the redirect.

[trooper27]

Google's just expanding their territory. However, I am not sure the Feedburner acquisition will bring any good, if I leave aside the principle "the best data is more data". Not very sure about that. I've seen how people are getting more and more unwilling to use Feedburner.