
Ask HN: Why hasn't anyone launched a Feedburner competitor since their collapse? - brandnewlow
Techcrunch has been bemoaning Feedburner's deteriorating service for a few weeks now. Others are complaining about it all over the web.  Why hasn't anyone announced a competitor service offering feed analytics?  Is it a tricky service to duplicate?  Hard to make money from?  Fear that Google will turn their act around and smite you?
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TomOfTTB
I think the money issue is the most pressing. The way I see it there’s a
couple problems.

1\. Even though feeds are fairly small and easy to serve there’s got to come a
point where you have so many users that even their small feeds begin to cost
significant money. Feedburner not only has to check the host feed often but
serve all the subscribers who poll as often as every 5 minutes. That’s a lot
of bandwidth and a lot of server power.

2\. With free analytics services all over the place it’s very unlikely you’ll
be able to make money on a subscriber model which leaves ads as the only
viable revenue stream. But for that to work you need a decent ad network
behind you and you can’t very well use adsense

With that said, I'd think it a fairly easy service to duplicate. All
Feedburner really does is read your feed and then repackage it while logging
the pertinent data from the subscriber http transactions and sticking it in a
database. Since every modern language I can think of has free libraries for
reading RSS/Atom feeds and logging transaction data the whole thing could
probably be duplicated in a couple days.

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sam_in_nyc
Technically, it doesn't seem very challenging at all. This is the perfect
usage case for caching. The feeds aren't user specific, are they?

If not user specific: user requests feed for xyz.com: try to pull from cache.
If there's a miss grab the feed from xyz.com, store to cache, and serve (be
sure to set cache to expire in however often is necessary). If cache hit,
you're done!

You can throw in extras, like make the cache semi fault tolerant by storing
the latest feed to a DB. If your cache ever dies, then you can grab from DB to
refill the cache.

Beyond that, it's just logging views and subscriptions to feeds.

Am I missing something? I don't actually use feedburner...

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apgwoz
To log views, you have to change links to redirect to your service first and
then redirect. But, that's not a huge technical hurdle. Other than that, I
think you've pretty much summed up the basics. Oh, I guess the other thing
they do, is convert direct links to the feed into something nice in the
browser, and provide embeddable widgets and doodads. Again, nothing terribly
hard about it.

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simonk
Google as your competition with a product used by almost everyone is probably
a little scary. And really a bunch of people have tried it and have yet to
find a way to make money.

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rokhayakebe
Upvoted but I do not like this idea of "do not go against Google". Zoho did
not stop and they are a profitable company without outside funding. All their
products compete with Google products. Twitter could have hung up when Google
bought Jaiku. Omnisio does not allow new sign ups, and yet there are several
people who can use the service. Gmail Chat is beautiful, but Meebo is still
doing well. Friend Connect is out there, but Facebook Connect got 1.5M updates
on Inauguration day. Android appstore has 800 apps, and the near future is not
looking good. And so on...

EDIT:I say pick one field where Google sucks and improve it, make it better.
One thing is for sure, you will have less competition by going against Google
then by going against Twitter or FriendFeed or HN...

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simonk
Yes; but, this is different. Your not competing with Google on something they
think could make a ton of money. Its not something that Google is missing out
on features. The problem is stability. Google has its own data centres and has
many experts on this.

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pstinnett
Just saw this posted on ReadWriteWeb:
[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_were_desperately_aw...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_were_desperately_awaiting.php)

Looks like someone is launching a competitor: Feedsqueezer,
<http://www.feedsqueezer.com/>

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wesley
The problem is, unless you're using MyBrand, switching to another competitor
means loosing all your existing subscribers.

Well, it doesn't if you leave the feedburner account alive. But it would be
great if google somehow allowed us to redirect the feedburner account
elsewehere via a 301 redirect. Ofcourse, that will never happen.

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simonk
Feedburner can do a 301 redirect for 30 days.

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wesley
Didn't know that, thanks!

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fnazeeri
I think there is a market opportunity. Google has basically abandoned
Feedburner. They have been doing a "migration" and my experience with that was
terrible. It basically blew up and lost subscribers. And I'm not alone. If you
look at the Feedburner "help group"
[http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-
statistics/topics?...](http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-
statistics/topics?start=) you'll see a ton of people complaining about lost
subscribers and there is not one response from anyone at Google.

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johns
I think a FeedBurner replacement could be a nice byproduct of another service.
I'm thinking something like Bloglines+Technorati(was)+FeedBurner. Those are
all just churning feeds in some way. Add analytics to it all, track trends
(offer a service for business to pay), mine data and then you might have
something.

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apgwoz
My question is, why did Technorati.com not ever get into this market? It seems
to me that they could provide more blogosphere tracking and hot spots if they
knew which articles people were actually reading, not just linking to.

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mtw
postrank/aiderss could offer this service in a snap. they already do the
polling. and they also do more analytics than feedburner by looking at other
services like digg/delicious/stumbleupon. however, this is not probably ilya's
vision

