I’ve always liked Feedburner.com, and now I like it even more. Let’s face it, most people (including me) are consuming Web content through RSS feeds — whether they read them through NetNewsWire, Bloglines.com, Feeddemon, Newsgator.com, Yahoo’s new RSS mail add-on or (heaven forbid) Google’s ugly “web clips.” I wonder how many people actually go to websites any more, rather than just reading what journalists call “the wire.”
As far as I can tell, Feedburner was one of the first companies to see that this was going to take off — and that people were going to need a way to produce a feed without having to worry about whether it was RSS .90 or RSS 2.0 or Atom or whatever. They’ve added some new features called FeedFlare (hat tip to TechCrunch, as usual) that beef up your feed — adding links to send an item by email, send an email to the author, search for links in technorati.com, tag it with del.icio.us and see how many comments there are.
Feedburner hasn’t just been catering to blogs and micro-publishers either. They’ve also been doing deals with major old-world publishers, including the Houston Chronicle, and they just announced a partnership with Reuters, one of the largest news organizations in the world. It’s a smart move for Feedburner, and I would argue a smart move for the Chronicle and Reuters too.
For more, take a look at what Fred Wilson has to say (he loves it), and Read/Write Web too. And congrats to Brad Feld, an investor in Feedburner.