14 DAY TRIAL // As expected by everyone, FeedBurner finally announced the migration to Google Account as part of the integration of its services into Google's product line. The Mountain View-based company Google acquired FeedBurner on June 3, 2007 and, even if the financial terms were not disclosed, people were talking about an acquisition price of about $100 million. Since FeedBurner has became a Google product, it was only a matter of time until the search company integrated support for Google account, an update which allows FeedBurner members to use the service with the same username and password they access Google's products, including here Gmail, Google Talk or Google Groups.
In a blog post published today, FeedBurner announced the migration and said that users wouldn't see too many changes in the coming week although Google would probably bring some new things to the already-registered consumers.
"Your feeds should continue to hum along as they did before, and all of your settings will be yours to manage through your new or existing Google account. This is the same shiny Google account you use to sign into other services at Google," the blog post reads.
In case you're already a member of FeedBurner, the migration will be done through a new function which should be implemented in the next weeks, the blog entry explains. Moreover, once a user moves his settings to the Google Account, the FeedBurner account "will no longer be usable."
"As part of this Google Account migration, we will need to make a few process changes for our API partners. Effective immediately, the FeedBurner Management API will only be available for existing FeedBurner partners and those Google partners who currently have access to other Google AdSense APIs. The Awareness API will continue to work exactly as it did before, noting that once you migrate to a Google account, you will have to use your Google account credentials IF you use the authenticated API," Steve of FeedBurner explained another change caused by the Google Account adoption.
As mentioned, it was only a matter of time until FeedBurner adopted the Google Account and, even if some people may consider this a very useful update, others may consider it a security issue. A few weeks ago, both users and security companies around the world raised concerns over the security of global accounts, including here Google account, Yahoo accounts and Windows Live accounts. Although nobody says it's easy to break into such an account, hacking one of these automatically means getting access to all the other services used by the affected user. For instance, if some hacker breaks into a Gmail account, he's also able to get into Google Talk, Google Calendar and soon, into FeedBurner.