

Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn? - technofication
http://chrisbaskind.com/2009/01/04/is-it-time-to-let-feedburner-burn/

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petercooper
It's very sad. FeedFlare has been broken for over a week now.

This article is rather loaded though:

 _Subscriber count chicklets: Nobody believes them. Nobody cares._

Since when? They're very useful, particularly to advertisers judging a market.

 _There are other ways to measure your RSS reach._

Like?

 _Feed flares: Most of these are useless junk._

When they work, they're pretty useful. I've had a lot of success with people
coming in from RSS readers to comment on the site when they see other people
have commented via the Feed Flare. Same for people adding to del.icio.us.
Desktop feed readers don't have "add to delicious" buttons.

I do agree with the general sentiment of the piece though.

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josefresco
If you believe 'Subscriber count chicklets', I've got a bridge to sell you...

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petercooper
They're more believable than many other guessed metrics that are used online -
Alexa, Compete, et al.

Services like Google Reader report their subscriber numbers in the user agent
string to FeedBurner and these are then included into the total. The remainder
is worked out from IP accesses, user agents, etc. It's not precise, but in
terms of the relationship between one feed and another, quite reliable.

There have been ways to "game" the figures here and there (such as the
Netvibes trick that went around a few months ago) but these are usually picked
up and solve and reputable content providers were not using them in the first
place.

A lot of people believe in numbers from places like Alexa or Compete and
they're far more shady than FeedBurner's numbers. My own analysis has shown
the numbers to be "reasonably" accurate, based over my own cumulative 30,000
or so subscribers on a few different feeds.

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Encosia
It's a shame that FeedBurner stagnated after Google acquired them, but there's
still not anything out there even remotely close to a viable alternative. It
doesn't seem fair to beat them up just because they haven't given us _even
more_ free services, when their fundamental product is still great.

~~~
thesethings
Not speaking for the article in specific, but just what I've been picking up
from people in general: It's not so much the lack of new services, but an eery
lack of communication post-acquisition. Also, lots of complaints about email
subscriptions being broken, and feed refreshes getting worse (slower) post-
acquisition.

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sh1mmer
I'd like to see some competition in the "metrics for your feed" space. The
other stuff, I can live without.

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johns
This seems like a perfect time for someone to build a new FeedBurner. And
while you're collecting all those feeds, build a better feed reader too so I
can finally give up dealing with Bloglines' issues (GReader is not an
alternative for me).

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slig
May I ask why GReader is not an alternative?

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johns
The iPhone version is pretty terrible (especially compared to Bloglines) and I
don't want a separate app for it (like Byline). No per-feed view settings
(headlines vs. full description) which makes skimming feeds way too
cumbersome.

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rscott
While I agree that the stagnation of the product has been sad, what other
metrics are out there to find how many RSS subscribers one has?

