Chris Baskind - Latest Comments in Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Chris Baskind — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:00:13 -0000

Your comment is certainly not spam, and I'll be over to check you out. :-)

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Chris Baskind — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:49:54 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Beth Kanter — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:42:07 -0000

what are the best ways to measure your RSS subscriber reach other than Feedburner? Postrank? Can you share some thoughts?

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

rodica — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 21:57:15 -0000

[+] definitely, in wordpress or whatever platform you're blogging from.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Georg Holzer — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 16:45:20 -0000

Now that would really be brilliant

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Chris Baskind — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 17:09:42 -0000

Your communication, Matt, have been very welcome. Thanks for addressing this.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Matt Cutts — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 16:52:02 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Douglas Karr — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:54:30 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Seth Gottlieb — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:14:23 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Mark Evans — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:00:04 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Chris Baskind — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:36:42 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Dave Bonta — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:20:54 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Chris Baskind — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 22:09:22 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

GeekLad — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:56:19 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Jack — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:12:29 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Jackson Miller — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:07:30 -0000

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).

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Rahsheen — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:01:18 -0000

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.

Re: Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?

Matt Cutts — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:59:23 -0000

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. :)