Feedburner has a nice service but the question remains why would 100,000 people trust a third party to update and maintain the lifeblood of the one single document that connects most sites to their readership. The trend is quite shocking.
The second question I raise and I will admit Feedburner has some cool tools the question I as is why haven’t companies like SixApart or any other weblog developer team built the same information into their applications.
But yet when I see websites that are supposedly leading edge hosting their rss feeds at FeedBurner I have to ask myself why would they trust their complete lifeline and economic model on a third party. It is well known that an update on a site does not necessarily mean that feedburner is going to know about it immediately. Sure you feed may get updated in a hour if your lucky additionally you have no idea if they go offline and they don’t graph any outages.
The instant a developer builds the same tool feedburner has that I can run on my own server is the day I get my check book out. Otherwise I will continue to serve up my RSS feed on my box and collect my own stats which are a hell of a lot more accurate than anything feedburner will ever give me.
Update: FeedBurner folks are saying that the TWIT feed has some API feature enabled that allowed the sharing of their subscriber data. It’s a catch 22 you choose not to enable it, and you will be pulled from a ranking list. Feedburner is saying they will have to do some more educating their users. Leo Laporte makes a update on his weblog but is still moving his feeds the pudding is in the comments!
Original: I have been saying for many months that I thought it was a VERY bad idea to be using FeedBurner as your primary RSS feed. It seems that Leo Laporte has figured that out the hard way, and is now moving away from FeedBurner as fast as he can get people to move.
Guess what though he is pretty much screwed, thousands of people have subscribed to that direct feedburner link. This is one of the reason I will never use a third party to host my RSS feed. [Leo Laporte]
I have had a number of people ask me to explain in more detail what I would like to see in the way of enhancements to the statistics of RSS feeds that I can control on my own server.
If you are using FeedBurner today, and that service disappeared tomorrow were would you turn to get the type of info they are providing. My contention is their are a lot of us that would feel much more comfortable running a RSS Stats application on our own servers that would replicate much of what FeedBurner is doing today without FeedBurner.
I am sure FeedBurner has good intentions with my users data, but I simply do not like giving up control of the life bread of my website, “RSS” to a third party, at the same time I want the same level of statistics Feedburner is providing as a service without giving up control of my feeds.
Some of you will say you can stop using them anytime. But the response I give is why should I even start when technology should allow me to do this locally.
The question I keep asking and one I have yet to get a satisfactory answer to, is why doesn’t this functionality exist today were I don’t have to outsource RSS Stats collection and potentially give someone access to your personal information.
Hey Doc
I do it every day, I have enough unique search terms setup to get a idea of who is getting it and who isn’t. I will say this all of them are missing a great deal and I am unsure how to explain it. I am almost positive that they really pay attention to the Top 100 or so link getters but the rest of us that are fighting for “Attention” seem to get lost in the crowd.
I find more people linking to my site through my referral logs than I do through most of these services. It is is obvious that most of them are companies that are too small to really be able to do a decent job at it all the time. Sure I love the service but they are missing stuff that’s down in the weeds.
My belief is that until the big search engines get on board this will continue to be the case. When the big search engines do get on board I feel sorry for those employed at [Technorati] [FeedBurner] [Pubsub] because if they don’t get acquired then they will see a lot of people shift to the all entailing big search engines. [Doc Searls]
