When I logged into FeedBurner today, I was presented with the following message:

Your FeedBurner account "shiflett" and all of your feeds should move to Google.

I've actually been seeing this message for a few weeks, but today I didn't have the option to skip it. If you use FeedBurner, you're being forced to migrate your account to Google today.

There are a couple of concerns worth noting as you make this move:

• The URL to your feed will change due to the migration from feeds.feedburner.com to feeds2.feedburner.com. Because the former redirects to the latter at the moment, there's still continuity, but if people have subscribed to the former, you'll lose subscribers if this ever changes. Does anyone know if Google is offering any assurances in this regard?
• If you use FeedBurner's Site Stats feature, every URL for every post in your feed will change due to the shift from feeds.feedburner.com to feedproxy.google.com. Because many aggregators use URLs to identify posts, this means you will inadvertently spam anyone subscribed to your feed. (Every post in your feed will seem like a new post.)

I'm sure this was not planned haphazardly, but it does seem like the second issue would have been easy to solve. If Google wanted to be clever, they could simply preserve the old URLs indefinitely, so old posts could still use the same (feeds.feedburner.com) URLs, and all new posts could use the new (feedproxy.google.com) URLs.

Via Twitter, I learned that Ben Ramsey ran into this problem and accidentally spammed Planet PHP along with all of his other subscribers. With his help, we were able to determine how to disable proxying entirely, so that the real URLs to his blog posts showed up in his feed. Here are Ben's instructions:

Click your feed -> click Configure Stats under the Services heading in the left-hand column of the "Analyze" tab -> uncheck "Item link clicks" and click the Save button.

Figure 1 illustrates this. Leaving the middle checkbox ("Item link clicks") unchecked will restore your URLs. You can inspect Ben's feed to see the results.

Figure 1:

With Google running the show, a Ma.gnolia meltdown seems unlikely, but it does seem like there are a few details that weren't addressed very well.

Because I've just made this switch myself, I decided to go ahead and change my feed URL while I'm at it. Although I plan to maintain the old feed URL indefinitely, please be sure you are subscribed to the following:

http://shiflett.org/feeds/blog

I have 4,088 subscribers according to FeedBurner. I'll add a comment or post a followup to let you know how this migration affects that number.

Good luck to everyone migrating their feed(s) today!