Thursday, February 21, 2008

Google FeedFetcher and FeedBurner Miss Each Other Again

This hasn't exactly been FeedBurner's best week.

First, the RSS syndication engine dropped all-time statistics due to a code error, and didn't quickly respond to user complaints, leading to questions from around the blogosphere, mine included. Making the problem worse was that the company's blog, once quite active, hadn't been updated in three months, most notably called out by Mashable.

Seemingly, both those issues were resolved, first, with the restoration of all-time stats, and second, seeing FeedBurner update their blog with a post, Hello? Hellooooo?, where they outlined their recent activity. First on their list? "Full integration with Google", no doubt much harder than it sounds.

But now, the very next day, it looks like Google's FeedFetcher, which reports how many RSS subscribers a blog has from Google Reader and iGoogle, didn't update FeedBurner. And around the blogosphere today, statistics are undoubtedly plunging. For example, louisgray.com saw subscribers more than cut in half, from 606 yesterday to 241 today, and ParisLemon plummeted, from 550 yesterday to 288 today. It's not the first time this has happened, but past instances have always led to promises of improved integration, and they're clearly not there yet.

It's enough to make me curious how RatingBurner is going to handle this data, once they synchronize their stats tomorrow.

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7 Comments:

At Feb 21, 2008 8:27:00 AM , Anonymous Nick Bradbury said...

My feed stats are showing just the opposite - my subscribers appear to have doubled overnight.

 
At Feb 21, 2008 9:18:00 AM , Blogger Webomatica said...

Up, down... mine are down. Have reached the point where the number is increasingly irrelevant.

 
At Feb 21, 2008 10:52:00 AM , Blogger MG Siegler said...

ha ha yeah i thought my lack of posting had driven the masses away...

 
At Feb 21, 2008 11:49:00 AM , Anonymous Chris R said...

I don't publish my readership, however, I found it strange that my readership declined significantly.

Any idea on when this will be fixed?

 
At Feb 21, 2008 12:08:00 PM , Anonymous Steven Hodson said...

I figured something was up with the service when I saw over a 100+ subscribers go missing from the counter.

 
At Feb 22, 2008 12:24:00 PM , Anonymous Eric Friedman said...

I experienced the same exact thing. I always see it as a system hiccup vs. a "problem" because FB always comes through in the end. I think the fact that the service does have these interruptions is excusable because it is free - although the paid accounts had the same troubles.

 
At Feb 22, 2008 8:13:00 PM , Blogger Logan Henriquez said...

Louis & Co, thanks for the great posts on the RSS world. This is somewhat off-topic for this post, but I was wondering if anyone has found an RSS ranking/aggregation service or Reader that is able to deliver really relevant content ranked in a way that you like. I've tried all of the services that you have discussed on this blog over the last few months, but they all add to my information overload rather than reduce it. What I'd like is a service that ranks my 200+ blog, news, and delicious feeds by tag(topic) as well as by by importance. Importance means importance inside that topic. I don't want generally popular postings, because those tend to have little to do with what I'm interested in. I only want those deemed valuable to "in the know" specialists in the particular topic. For instance, I'd like the daily top 10 postings that other Rails developers thought were important. AideRSS seems to have that general idea in mind, but when I load them up with my link blog they break.

Has anyone seen a service like that? Does anyone else feel like they want a similar service?

 

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