Just a few thoughts: - I've heard a few people mention complaints about latency recently and I just passed on a couple of those threads to other people at Google. Fair feedback, and it's appreciated. - Duncan Riley mused that FeedBurner is more about advertising these days, but that's Duncan's take. Have you seen any statement from Google that backs up Duncan's opinion? I'm not aware of any statement by Google to that effect. - Dave Winer worries about outsourcing feed burning to Google, but with FeedBurner's MyBrand service (which is now free, courtesy of Google), you keep your feeds on your own domain. Do a Google search for [master feed domain] to see Danny Sullivan's excellent write-up on how to do this. This is how I handle the feeds on my blog, and I can leave FeedBurner any time I want just by where feeds.mattcutts.com points to, so I remain in control of my feed's destiny. :)
Chris Baskind
· 11 months ago
Matt, thank you for responding. Most of us here are longtime FeedBurner, and would be delighted to see Google reignite the flame. You're fully capable of making FeedBurner both a modern feed manager and an impressive ad delivery system.
That being said, why has it taken Google so long to poke its head up and show some interest in our concerns? You question my qualified references to Duncan and Dave (and there has been a steady drumbeat from Gillmore, Scoble, and a number of others). I'm not even a tech writer. Shouldn't you have been talking to these guys all along? Duncan's article has been around a while, and the one at Scripting News dates back to July. you've had plenty of time.
Your point is well-taken on MyBrand, and I'll repeat my article's appreciation of Google's generosity in making FeedBurner's premium services free for all. Here's to a bright future.
Matt Cutts
· 11 months ago
Chris, the perception that I had was that the FB folks were talking to at least a few of these folks off and on about the issues, but I don't really know more.
Chris Baskind
· 11 months ago
Your communication, Matt, have been very welcome. Thanks for addressing this.
Douglas Karr
· 11 months ago
Rather than backing up Feedburner, it would be a much better solution to simply integrate feed statistics directly in WordPress so we weren't dependent upon 3rd party services for data collection.
Georg
· 11 months ago
Now that would really be brilliant
rodica
· 11 months ago
[+] definitely, in wordpress or whatever platform you're blogging from.
Rahsheen
· 11 months ago
I have heard this idea bounced around a lot recently. One of the reasons I use Feedburner is because I assumed it was more reliable and took some of the weight off my hosting account, but I wonder if that's even an issue. I don't have many subscribers in the first place.
jaxn
· 11 months ago
I am working on a nice alternative that provides feed analytics, combined with web analytics, in a way that makes sense for bloggers. We are currently in private beta but will be opening up soon. If you are interested you can check us out at statzen.com.
(I hope you don't consider this spam. I saw this post at HackerNews and after reading it thought you might find this comment useful).
Chris Baskind
· 11 months ago
Your comment is certainly not spam, and I'll be over to check you out. :-)
Jack
· 11 months ago
I'm all for dumping Feedburner, I just want to know how I can see the views/clicks stats for my RSS feeds as well as a list of emails that are subscribed.
GeekLad
· 11 months ago
In addition to using MyBrand, you can also disable item link clicks. Disabling item link clicks will remove the FeedBurner redirects on the article titles. When you do this, the article titles in the feed will link to the original permalink for the posts. You can leave the rest of the stats features enabled.
Dave
· 11 months ago
Helpful article, Chris - thanks. Not sure I'm quite ready to follow your lead yet, though I have noticed increasingly sluggish performance from Feedburner lately. Maybe it'll be like Blogger, which languished for a couple of years after Google acquired it, but did finally start to get some attention again, and is actually not that shitty a platform anymore, I gather.
Chris Baskind
· 11 months ago
I certainly hope so, Dave -- Google can make AdSense for Feeds insanely useful if they care to. I'm leaving Lighter Footstep on FeedBurner for now, though I have ben planning to transition our email subscription support to a commercial service for months. In the meantime, this site and GreenRemix will fly solo. Until there are other developments, at least.
Mark Evans
· 11 months ago
Great post - and I think idea an idea that a lot of people having people thinking about but not publicly proclaiming...yet.
Google's post-purchase treatment of FB is just another example of how Google does such a mediocre job of making deals really work. It seems that the common modus operandi for acquisitions is to make things free but do little to keep these start-ups innovating. Strange.
sggottlieb
· 11 months ago
Great article. FreedBurner afforded me less lock in on blogging system but (now I realize) more lock in on my feeding system. I have been steadily building feed subscribers and it is a little frightening to think that I would have to start all over again if FeedBurner becomes intolerable.
As it stands, I think that the FeedBurner admin UI is pathetic. The organization (optimize, publicize...) makes no sense at all. In the near term, I think I will remove all those delicious etc. feedflare links and use the corresponding Wordpress plugins and theme mods. Great point about bookmarking the wrong URL.
Ajay
· 11 months ago
Great article. Besides using MyBrand, a good option is to use .htaccess redirects to the feedburner feeds.
This is what I have been doing on all my blogs. I ask users to subscribe to my native feed itself. Recently I had to shift feeds because FB suddenly stopped working on one blog.
And another feed just got deleted for no reason on the Feedproxy service.
As for the support, it is simply terrible!
Beth Kanter
· 11 months ago
what are the best ways to measure your RSS subscriber reach other than Feedburner? Postrank? Can you share some thoughts?
Chris Baskind
· 11 months ago
On this site, I'm using Mint metrics and the Birdfeeder plugin. The numbers it has been producing are very similar to those measured by FeedBurner. Don't get me wrong: This was just a thought piece, and I expect FeedBurner to improve. But there are other options, and I expect we'll see new ones this year.
All Comments
- I've heard a few people mention complaints about latency recently and I just passed on a couple of those threads to other people at Google. Fair feedback, and it's appreciated.
- Duncan Riley mused that FeedBurner is more about advertising these days, but that's Duncan's take. Have you seen any statement from Google that backs up Duncan's opinion? I'm not aware of any statement by Google to that effect.
- Dave Winer worries about outsourcing feed burning to Google, but with FeedBurner's MyBrand service (which is now free, courtesy of Google), you keep your feeds on your own domain. Do a Google search for [master feed domain] to see Danny Sullivan's excellent write-up on how to do this. This is how I handle the feeds on my blog, and I can leave FeedBurner any time I want just by where feeds.mattcutts.com points to, so I remain in control of my feed's destiny. :)
That being said, why has it taken Google so long to poke its head up and show some interest in our concerns? You question my qualified references to Duncan and Dave (and there has been a steady drumbeat from Gillmore, Scoble, and a number of others). I'm not even a tech writer. Shouldn't you have been talking to these guys all along? Duncan's article has been around a while, and the one at Scripting News dates back to July. you've had plenty of time.
Your point is well-taken on MyBrand, and I'll repeat my article's appreciation of Google's generosity in making FeedBurner's premium services free for all. Here's to a bright future.
(I hope you don't consider this spam. I saw this post at HackerNews and after reading it thought you might find this comment useful).
Google's post-purchase treatment of FB is just another example of how Google does such a mediocre job of making deals really work. It seems that the common modus operandi for acquisitions is to make things free but do little to keep these start-ups innovating. Strange.
As it stands, I think that the FeedBurner admin UI is pathetic. The organization (optimize, publicize...) makes no sense at all. In the near term, I think I will remove all those delicious etc. feedflare links and use the corresponding Wordpress plugins and theme mods. Great point about bookmarking the wrong URL.
This is what I have been doing on all my blogs. I ask users to subscribe to my native feed itself. Recently I had to shift feeds because FB suddenly stopped working on one blog.
And another feed just got deleted for no reason on the Feedproxy service.
As for the support, it is simply terrible!