We should know by now that any of the largest companies in the world right now are in fact the most important ones because of their appetite and their capabilities to buy other companies. Google indeed took some great decisions in the last 10 years about this: YouTube, FeedBurner, Postini and Picasa are just a few of those.

Take a look to the complete list. Take note that this infographic divides the acquisition in time and type (technology, market and talent):

• Hajj Pilgrimage Live to Watch on YouTube for Free – November 4, 2011
• Breaking: Google Acquires Motorola Mobility for $12.5 Billion – August 15, 2011
• YouTube To Launch Movies On Demand Service: Key iTunes Competitor – April 26, 2011
• Watch Live: Royal Wedding to be Streamed Live on YouTube – April 19, 2011
• YouTube Videos Now Allows You to Alter Playback Speed – February 19, 2011

[infographic] Google’s Appetite originally appeared on: Crenk
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There are three facts existing in today’s 2.0 worls about feeds:

1. FeedBurner represents, even before Google acquired this company, the preferred service used for RSS feeds.
2. All bloggers, web sites and companies, which base most of their strategy in number of visitors; know that having a nice way to show the popularity of your website is a key factor for attracting more loyal visitors, advertisements, etc.
3. FeedBurner values change tremendously every day, if you are not publishing on daily basis.

To fix this problem, we can use this code in functions.php which will use the average readers from the last 7 days, a number more accurate for our RSS feed (download the TXT for functions.php):

function get_average_readers($feed_id,$interval = 7){
	$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("now"));
	$ago = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("-".$interval." days"));
	$feed_url="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=".$feed_id."&dates=".$ago.",".$today;
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
	$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

	$nb = 0;
	foreach($xml->feed->children() as $circ){
		$nb += $circ['circulation'];
	}

	return round($nb/$interval);
}

Once done, you can call the function wherever you want in your theme files. Pass your Feedburner feed id as a parameter (download the TXT for this example):

<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode');
echo "I have ".$nb." RSS readers";
?>

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• Tiny Tiny RSS: Open Source Google Reader Alternative – July 12, 2011

How to Fix the FeedBurner Counter Problem originally appeared on: Crenk
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