ReadWriteWeb

After my post that reviewed promising new email subscription services Zookoda and Yutter, I got an email from Feedburner telling me they had a new email service in the works. Tonight it was released - in fact you may have noticed it in my site menu earlier today. True to form, Feedburner's new offering is slick and took only a few minutes to set up in my Feedburner account and on my website.

The main features:

• The emails are not branded, so they look as if they come from the publisher (and the reply-to email address is that of the publisher).
• The publisher has full access to their email list, within their Feedburner account, and can export it anytime.
• The email subscription form is cut-and-past javascript, which is easy for the publisher to implement.
• The emails are delivered daily.
• The HTML rendering of the blog content is very good, on a par with (even better in some cases) a normal RSS Reader.
• It's a free service.
• No subscriber interface in which the subscriber can manage things at FeedBurner.
• No subscriber landing page on signup.

Those last two points signify that this is a publisher-centric offering from Feedburner and they're not attempting to be an email aggregator. This is in line with what Zookoda and Yutter are doing. 

Feedburner has existing partnerships with Squeet and Feedblitz (note: Phil Hollows from Feedblitz made some good comments in my previous post, in response to my criticism of them). But it's always made sense for Feedburner to integrate email into their service - and make it as publisher-friendly as possible.

Sample of email

Feedburner's large user base and the fact that so many influential bloggers use their service already is going to make it tough for Zookoda and Yutter to make headway. Many bloggers, like I did today, will find it easier to just 'switch on' the Feedburner option rather than start a new account with an unknown service. Mike Arrington certainly thinks so.

However I'm planning to give both Zoodoka and Yutter a fair chance for my business, because I was impressed enough with their feature sets to want to trial them further. And I will, once I get some time to implement them on R/WW.

Of course now that Feedburner has entered the market with its own product, it'll be interesting to see how Zoodoka, Yutter and the others differentiate themselves. Zoodoka seems to have more advanced features than Feedburner, like creating custom email newsletters. And Yutter has some nice options too, such as blog branding, which Feedburner lacks. So despite the odds being stacked in RSS heavyweight Feedburner's favor, I'm not declaring Game Over just yet.

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