Image via CrunchBase

There's been a lot of grumbling about FeedBurner lately. The service, which provides statistics and ad injections for website feeds, was purchased back in mid-2007 by Google. After about a year of mostly ignoring the service, Google finally began integrating it with the rest of their other services. And here's where the trouble begins.

The transition from being a standalone system to part of Google's suite of services for websites hasn't been the smoothest, nor has Google been all that upfront about things during it. One of the biggest complaints I've seen has involved to move from FeedBurner Ad Network (which provided both feed and site ads) to Google AdSense. Others, myself included, had worries about the new feed URLs and what would happen to those who follow on the old. Some people, like blogger Steven Hodson, have simply grown a distaste of the service and have other issues (which might not be related to the switch).

Not everything about the switch is bad, though. For starters, with FeedBurner now integrated with Google's other website services, we might start seeing some improvements with the service again. And despite the dip in stats that most people have seen when switching from classic FeedBurner to Google FeedBurner, the updated service seems to be a lot more steady with the numbers, no longer showing the wild and unexplainable fluctuations that have plagued users for so long. (And there's no doubt in my mind that Google is working to integrate feed stats with Google Analytics, or at least base an update to feed stats on the service).

Where do you stand? Despite being nervous about making the switch, I did it and after a scary drop in reported readers for a couple of days, I've since seen things rise up to higher numbers than classic FeedBurner ever reported and stay steadier since. But perhaps, as for Steven Hodson, things have only gone downhill since making the switch. What advice would you give people who haven't yet made the switch, or are looking for FeedBurner competitors?

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