If not the majority, at least a great number of RSS addicts are using FeedBurner. And that is because the basic account is free and also powerful. And what’s better than free services? More free services, of course. Google is giving us exactly that.

After the acquisition of FeedBurner, Google decided that all users should make full use of the services for free. Current premium accounts will not be billed starting this month and all the basic accounts will gain additional features.

• The statistics of how many people viewed, or clicked an individual post of your feed (this was part of what FeedBurner called “TotalStats”)
• The “Read” stats, which are an estimation of how many subscribers interacted with your feed on a given day
• A feature called “MyBrand” which allows you to set up a FeedBurner feed right on your domain

MyBrand is a particularly interesting feature, for it allows you to ‘brand’ your feeds by using your own domain name. Until now the FeedBurner URLs were something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/trendplex, but from now on you can customize look of your URL after your own will.

The new free features sure are good news for the 450,000 users who now have free accounts. All you have to do is to ‘upgrade’ to FeedBurner Pro from your administration interface.

“We suspect this will be welcome news to the 450,000+ of you using many of our other free services, but understanding that your feed is your feed, you will need to activate these newly freed-up services in order to partake in their awesomeness.”

But this is not the first time Google makes an acquired service free, they have done this before with applications like Picasa, Google Earth, SketchUp and others. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining, it’s good for users and it’s also good for business, as Google has proven times and again.