New feature?

I've just been on the bStats site which is Blogger's stats stuff for BlogSpot Plus users. Except it isn't. The page says that it is only for the premium service users yet I've just logged in, got my blog list and added the code to the New Links template. It works. Yay!

We are currently using StatCounter which is a really good free stats service with data drill downs by country, referrer etc. The only problem with it is that the free service only keeps the details for the last 100 hits. The bStats service looks like it keeps everything as there are pages to see most popular page of the day, week, month and year. There isn't as much info available in the stats but the fact it keeps the info for longer means it may ultimately end up the better stats to use for New Links.

The bStats front page has this bit on it:

NOTE: bSTATS is currently free for Blog*Spot Plus users (hey, by the way, upgrade!) and not available for anyone else. If everything goes well, it will be available for others in the near future.

So are they preparing to roll it out for free to Blogger users now or have they simply left the back door open? I don't know so I've left the StatCounter code in place for now just in case the 'free' bStats gets pulled for whatever reason.

EDIT: I forgot to mention I found the bStats site via a post about bStats' temporary unavailability on the Blogger Service Status page.