As a quick introduction for those that aren’t aware of it, Feedburner is the stats management package for your RSS feeds, monitoring a great depth of information from subscriber numbers to click through’s to your pages. It re-writes your RSS feed and allows you to add features and customisations adding greater value to both your readers and you as the site marketer or owner.

This clearly is a good deal for all concerned, Feedburner is a relatively established web startup (almost a contradiction) that has raised a little over $10 million dollars in funding and is currently monitoring 422,717 publishers with 721,074 feeds. This works out at roughly $236 a head which in comparison to many social networking sites is pretty high. For Google they are getting the no.1 feed stats management package out there with an established user base and technology.

So what does Google’s acquisition for a reported $100 million mean and how could it effect you as the customer / reader?

• This clearly confirms the value of RSS feeds that many in the web and advertising industry already know. Many net savy readers already read sites through news readers, rarely venturing to the actual site itself and while monetising feeds (as its come to be known) isn’t new this is confirmation that Google clearly sees this as another advertising medium they would like to swallow.
• Google are very unlikely to pull this one out of the open web space like they did with Adaptive Path’s MeasureMap but surely this acquisition will lead the way to integration into Google Analytics. The integration with Adsense and Analytics would seem to make it a likely brethren, ultimately though making web stats a requirement of the feed stats could be a bold move to far though.
• This will be bad news for users who would ‘prefer’ not to use Adsense to monetise their sites as the current ad networks will be inevitably squeezed out in favour of Google based advertising in the future.

Congratulations Feedburner, clear and present evidence of another company making one hell of a profit from flipping their company to one of the biggest out there.

Well, since the acquisition of Measure Map over 12 months ago, it seems the UI team has been working over time on this one. Analytics 2.0, for want of a better expression, appears a major improvement on the original and allows major customisation over the interface allowing you to create views that apply to your business and market. With ‘flexible graphing tool’ allowing you to compare trends over different time periods, reporting appears vastly superior and with increased integration with adwords this looks as though it will be a valuable tool to website owners and marketeers.

A feature that was lacking though, something that PulseRSS has made available, is web stats through RSS; I covered this briefly here but I for one am hoping they have made this valuable feature available.

It seem Google has learnt from the original massive demand for Analytics when originally released though and will be rolling Analytics ‘2.0′ out over the next month to everyone. So if you haven’t had the upgrade yet, in the mean time, check out the feature tour for more information.

Personally my major gripe with Analytics over the last 18 months has been the slow or patchy updating of ‘my’ data. Providing the speed issue has been addressed though then Google really could have another corner of the web covered.

Pulse is a hosted web app that gives you the basic of statistics for your website available as a RSS feed or through their site. Simply sign up and add the JavaScript to the footer of your site’s (x)html to start tracking visits, incoming links and search keywords. Then log in and subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite reader and check out the stats while reading the headlines and drinking your morning coffee.

With the data available in xml format too, I am just waiting for someone to develop a Wordpress plugin. Stats available in your dashboard would be very handy.

Best of all though….. its FREE and with more features to come it can only become more useful.

I have been looking at Virb in some more depth through the beta phase recently. I am a sucka for well designed sites, and Virb fits nicely into this criteria. Certainly Virb offers an awful lot for the designer in us all and has been developed from the ground up with this in mind. Complete customization of the front and backend like this, has not been seen before in popular social network and should encourage many people originally put off by the blinding customizations popular in MySpace. Structured ‘Modules’ incorporating content from third partied like YouTube and Odeo can be created and placed in your profile and as a user you have control over the html and CSS – heaven! No more div overlays!

Conversely, most social networks downfall, the ‘MySpace design effect’, is alleviated in Virb with the simplest solutions; a ‘remove customization’ button prominently placed in the header. Clicking this button restores the original, clean, simple and most importantly neutral default theme that ‘ships’ with each new profile and is remembered when you return to the profile.

Labeled by Christina Marie, “MySpace for Grownups”, Virb certainly fits the bill. With de-facto social networking features and advanced abilities to come like importing blog posts via RSS, Virb has done an awful lot right.

So where does it fit in? My thinking is that currently the MySpace monolith might be too big at the moment but in the future there are going to be a lot of existing users from Facebook and Bebo that may move as the site snowballs. One thing I am sure about is that there is space for a mature social network in this crowded marketplace. Vox, the closed social network or social blogging platform, had better watch out.

From their blog.

Gmail sign-ups are now open worldwide! No more waiting for someone to invite you—just create an account directly at www.gmail.com.

Though still in ‘beta’ I have used Gmail for a long time now with virtually no problems. If you haven’t moved your webmail across from other inferior web email apps, now is the time to do it. Gmail is quite simply excellent.

Firefox is still the best browser out there, we all know that, but some of the little features and touches that these guys add are quite simply amazing.

Everyone using Firefox 2 should know that you can drag your tabs to re-organise where they are listed from left to right which is a powerful feature in itself. From an organisational point of view though I quite often work with an Active Collab tab first, my SideJob account open next and maybe my delicious account after with whatever I am reading thereafter. Occasionally I need to move these around if I start browsing something and then get down to work which and this feature is handy and a time saver.

What I didn’t realise until today is that I can move tabs between Firefox windows! In the same way that you would drag a tab left and right to re-organise, you can drag a tab down to another Firefox window, where it would maximise, and then place as you would normally on the tab bar. This excellent feature also works for links, dragging the link to another window and letting go on the tab bar reloads that link in a new tab. Alternatively drop it on a current tab to load in that tab.

Is this another case of Firefox staying more than one step ahead of IE7?

It would appear, and rightly so, that Google has remembered its informal corporate motto, “Don’t be evil.” – well with a little help from the blogspere at least. It seems that someone’s 20%¹ turned into helping us all with tips (read prime advertising) at the top of certain search results on Google. Specifically targeting searches for software or services that Google has a competing product they handily suggested their software above the number 1 search result.

Well after the resulting booing and hissing it appears Google have taken note and, for the moment at least, removed these ‘handy suggestions’. Well done to all concerned, it appears that if we shout loudly enough, even companies tripping over the dollars take note (I couldn’t see anything on their blog about this though).

Interestingly if they had simply continued putting their products at the top of the paid advertising on search results for these terms it would have been far less obtrusive and significantly less noteworthy.

1. Google engineers all have “20 percent time” in which they’re free to pursue projects they’re passionate about. Source: Google [back]

IE7, while a massive improvement on IE6 with features such as tabbed browsing, RSS integration and improved rendering engine amongst others, it is still not right. Even with all the stink in the web community about the lack of a standards based browser from the major OS developer, IE7 is still some distance from Firefox 2 or even 1.5 for that matter. For all the effort that has been put into IE7 it’s ironic that as we enter a time for major change in the PC world with Vista, IE7 would have probably been a mostly cosmetic enhancement if it wasn’t for Firefox. Yet still I get the impression of IE7 being a ‘just enough’ browser to appease the majority and keep the web community just far enough from the door. I’d expect much more to come from Microsoft in future releases.

Firefox is continually evolving though, taking (relatively) small steps each time but each time getting the improvements right; creating a product that is a pleasure to use. The integration and perfection of the session saver add-on (extension) is a perfect example of doing the good things really well.

Battles require a contest and I can’t help but feel that from Microsoft’s point of view the browser battle is already won and aren’t really trying. Credit should be given to the IE team for the improvements to IE7 but they still have a long way to go until they are taken seriously by developers and designers and their browser being not being treated with the contempt it currently deserves. There will always be people who want to stray from the conventional but until businesses wake up and see the productivity and usability benefits, Firefox will continue to grow at nowhere near the rate it warrants.

From Mozilla’s and the privileged end users point of view, Firefox is still quite clearly a number of steps ahead of IE7 and they know this. While the gap between Firefox and IE7 has narrowed, and the competition will eventually benefit Firefox’s user too, I don’t get the impression the developers and people involved are too concerned about the developments coming from Microsoft at the moment.

A Browser War? A lovers tiff more like. Maybe in the future with the releases of IE8 and FF3 but at the moment this is just the beginning. As the consumer, the real benefit we will receive is an improved browser that many are forced to use in their workplace and the continued polish of an excellent browser in the home!