Yesterday, when I logged into my Feedburner account I saw a new Item on the menu, “My Networks”. Well it seems that Feedburner is making a new move to gain more market share in the RSS feeds space.

They describe it in the service FAQ as:

FeedBurner Networks is a service (currently in beta), that encourages discoverability and self-promotion of your feed content.

What this mean:

• Networks are basically a group of feeds on a similar topic.
• Everybody who is invited can join and create a new network.
• Each network gets a distinct page on the feedburner server that aggregates the content from all the feeds (sample here)
• From the network page you can subscribe to the aggregated feed, or you can download it as an OPML to read it in your own reader
• The network page provides a search engine inside a network that is based on Lijit (this name is very new to me, is worth checking it) and Google Custom Search Engine. Due to the fact that Google CSE doesn’t offer a public API this could be a sign of an internal deal between the 2 companies.

Other interesting stuff:

• This is not a very young service (in terms of days). Just look at how many pages Google knows already
• People that have this service are most likely only FAN members
• All the persons invited can automatically and without limitations can invite others
• All the new members seem to automatically have access to FAN
• For networks members, and FAN publishers, the cost for CPM starts from 3 USD

Why this is BIG and why publishers will be interested to join:

• They automatically have access to FAN, and by this have the possibility to gain additional income
• By being associated with other popular feeds, your popularity will rise
• Gain more visibility, traffic and subscribers to your feed