Alright, so we’re a little behind on announcing this feature as well. It’s been live for weeks and is a real time-saver for everyone involved: the new, self-service Feed Transfer capability. As more and more people build blogs and burn feeds, changes in content ownership and control lead to the desire to move a FeedBurner feed from one account to another. In ye goode olde days, someone who wanted to transfer a feed to another account used to a submit a request to us, and then a staffer in our own Central Planning and Command-Line Voodoo department would verify the accounts and then complete the actual feed transfer. Reliable, but time-consuming and tedious for all parties involved.
Away with workaday drudgery! If you own a feed, you may now transfer it to anyone you like simply by using the Transfer Feed… link, which is listed on your feed’s details page.
Just provide the email address of the person you wish to transfer this feed to and FeedBurner will send them a transfer request email. The recipient clicks a link in the email and then creates or signs into a FeedBurner account and accepts the transfer on-the-spot. The transfer itself will be completed immediately, moving the feed from your account to theirs. (Please note that only feed owners may initiate transfers from their own accounts to others. Additional how-to info about Feed Transfer is in our Help Center topic.)
We hope this update makes the process of moving feeds around much simpler for all of you. Thanks for letting us know just how popular (and necessary) this feature is!
On the Finding of Help and the Getting of Answers
As we recently posted, FeedBurner’s integration into Google is moving along. We’ve got our coding hats on and are hard at work to get the essential product pieces where they need to be.
However, one somewhat-below-the-radar part of FeedBurner’s integration that is already showing up as part of google.com is our new Help Center. (Well, “new” as of late 2007. We admit to being a touch slow on the draw with the PR on this one.) We point this out to show that migrating to a Googley-er tomorrow isn’t strictly tied to FeedBurner charts ‘n graphs ‘n numbers. It used be difficult to find answers; a popup window here, a Forums post there, a blog post over yonder. The Help Center brings sorely needed structure (and searchability) to a bunch of resources that were largely scattered about before. You can now find topics like “What is a Subscriber? How does FeedBurner tally them?”, and “Is there a feed file size limit?” in just one place. (We’ve still got nothing for you on “How can I avoid jury duty selection?”) The Help Center will soon introduce new troubleshooting topics and contact options as well.
Speaking of the Forums: they are overdue for the Google treatment, too. We’ve provided them since shortly after FeedBurner launched as an essential, community-powered companion to the service itself. In the next few weeks, the Forums will move to a new Google Group, with the following benefits:
- Much less spam
- Improved [BUY CH3AP STUFF ONL1NE] search for old topics and conversations
- New email notification options when new topics are posted
- Much, much [FREE V!AGRA NOW] less spam
We also want to point out that FeedBurner Japan is also going to benefit from these Help Center and Groups changes, too. But what about the many other languages FeedBurner publishers use? Google strongly believes in making products accessible to the widest global audience; efforts to formally localize FeedBurner for the most popular and requested languages are under way
