FeedBurner makes paid services free
FeedBurner has announced that both its Stats PRO and MyBrand services will be free from now on. This news is coming a little over a month after Google acquired FeedBurner at the end of May. I will admit that I was a little skeptical when Google bought FeedBurner as to how it would affect the actual service, but this is certainly a step in the right direction.
FeedBurner's Stats PRO is just an enhancement to the regular stats that FeedBurner already provides. Most notably, it contains a stat called "reach" and also item views. As opposed to the number of subscribers that is displayed by FeedBurner, reach is a measure of how many people are "actively engaging with your content." If you want to enable Stats PRO on your account, you have to go and turn it on in your feed's control panel, though it is free for everyone.
MyBrand is a service that really appeals to larger sites that still want the benefits of using FeedBurner, such as stat tracking, but want everything to be hosted on their own domain. MyBrand lets you host your feed and access all of your stats from your domain to make the whole experience very transparent.
So, if you are interested in either of these services, just log in to your FeedBurner account and make the upgrade for free. Hopefully these are just the first of many improvements to come for FeedBurner now that it is backed by Google.
Harrison Hoffman is a tech enthusiast and co-founder of LiveSide.net, a blog about Windows Live. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. 
