Dancing About Architecture

I recently checked my email archive to find out when, exactly, we launched the "pre-alpha" of FeedBurner. Turns out it was February 25, 2004 ... three years ago today. Happy birthday, FeedBurner!

Here was the original email that we sent out to friends and family on that day. I'm amazed with how we've pretty much stayed on target with our original vision.

Hi there,

We are very excited to announce a pre-alpha release of our new service, FeedBurner.com ( http://www.feedburner.com ). FeedBurner is an RSS/Atom post-processing service that enables publishers of syndicated content to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways. By "pre-alpha", we mean that the software still contains a number of bugs, and while we wouldn't release something that was "unstable", we also wouldn't go throwing around the term "high availability" just yet either.

Our pre-alpha release contains a small subset of the services we will be rolling out over the coming weeks. Look for additional services like authenticated feeds (enabling premium content to be syndicated), "future-proofing" to eliminate the market's current debate over feed formats, and even content namespace enhancements to facilitate the broad syndication and feed-splicing of rich content types (eg, think syndicated music meta-data and associated news and purchase information).

As syndication and non-browser content aggregation/display become rapidly more popular, we believe our "syndication clearinghouse" model will provide a large collection of publishers with an enourmous [sic] amount of leverage in the market. For example, today even the most popular bloggers have little to no control over how frequently their content is polled, what newsreaders do with their content layout/style, or how many advertisements are layered into the display at the fringes of syndication. Nor are they afforded any revenue opportunities for their syndicated content. By channeling large numbers of publishers through our post-processing facility, we can begin to help these publishers effect changes to their benefit in a number of interesting ways ( poorly coded newsreaders that excessively drain bandwidth can be shutout, significant opportunities to provide revenue channels to the individual publisher emerge, and much much more).

If you'd like to stay up to speed on the service and the company, we are going to maintain a weblog at http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner that tracks the progress of the company and service, and we'll also use this space to discuss publisher services and business issues.

best,

Dick Costolo
CEO
Burning Door Syndication Services, Inc.
http://www.feedburner.com