14 DAY TRIAL // The recently-acquired FeedBurner might become free for all the users because the PRO version is already offering an attractive promotion for the interested consumers. As blogger Ionut Alex Chitu noticed, FeedBuner PRO can be used for free for a period up to 15 days but you still have to pay approximately $5 per month after the trial period ends. However, this is an interesting step because it's not the first time when Google acquires a company and before making them 100 percent free, it offers a short trial to attract consumers. Ionut Alex Chitu offered as examples Google Earth, Picasa and SketchUp, the 3D modelling tool that was bought by Google on March 14, 2006.
"By default, FeedBurner already enabled the reach metrics for everyone. "Reach is the total number of people who have taken action - viewed or clicked - on the content in your feed. Subscribers is a measure of how many people are subscribed to your feed. At any given time, you can expect that a certain percentage of this subscriber base is actively engaging with your content and this "Reach" measurement provides this additional insight," the blogger mentioned.
In addition, FeedBurner MyBrand, a solution powered by FeedBurner and that allows publishers to distribute their own feeds straight from their domains, is available for free without any fee. It seems like before the Google acquisition, the product was valued at $3-$14 per month as the same blogger mentions.
"With MyBrand, publishers can continue to take advantage of all of FeedBurner's services, but provide a transparent experience by running everything through their domain (e.g. feeds.yoursitenamehere.com) instead of ours," the parent company Google says.
Now, if Google has this interesting technique to buy major companies and make their solutions available for free, let's hope that the Mountain View giant is interested in acquiring the famous Windows operating system and release it with a freeware license. In my dreams...