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10 February 2009 14 Comments

Vetoing FeedBurner

I’ve been a fan of FeedBurner for a long time. Going all the way back to the early days at b5media when they were a good company. Then they sold out to Google, and I warned any who would listen exactly who they would become. It was denied, though (most likely in good faith), and then they went down hill. Since the Google acquisition, they have slowly ported over to Google servers and infrastructure – an enhancement that was supposed to help. I can honestly not say if it has or it hasn’t. What I do know is that they are not noticeably better.

Then, of course, they had an outage today.

I’d call that the equivalent of calling out sick on the third day of a new job.

In the next 30 days, I have decided to remove all of my content from FeedBurner. They no longer have my vote of confidence, nor do I trust their competence. It’s probably a management thing more than technical. Much of the same team is still in place as was prior to the Google acquisition. You know, when they were good.

Please ensure that, if you subscribe to this feed using a feed reader (You really should use a feed reader… it does make blog reading so much easier. Despite my clear disdain for Google in this matter, I swear by Google Reader), you are subscribed to

1
http://technosailor.com/feed

For the time, this URL redirects to FeedBurner, but it will soon not and you don’t want to lose the feed subscription.

For a very long time, we have needed a viable alternative to FeedBurner. I don’t think we need all the bling that FeedBurner offered necessarily. But we do need an alternative to FeedBurner that will take a feed, normalize it for the most feed readers, provide some insight around readership (such as number of subscribers) and an extensible framework/API for using and publishing that data.

I’d very much like to talk to anyone who is developing options around this concept.

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Written by Aaron Brazell on February 10, 2009

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14 Responses to “Vetoing FeedBurner”

  1. Andy Brudtkuhl 10 February 2009 at 5:28 pm #

    I’ve been trying to find a replacement myself.. Doesn’t seem to be any viable competitors… I’ve been looking into WordPress plugins to replace Feedburner’s functionality.

    FeedBurner has gone to shit but has opened up a huge hole in the market… Who will step in?

  2. Scot Hacker 10 February 2009 at 5:36 pm #

    Out of curiosity… with all the excellent feed readers available, why Google Reader, which is IMO the ugliest/clunkiest of the lot?

  3. Ari Herzog 10 February 2009 at 10:37 pm #

    I, too, have sought a Feedburner alternative for many months–to no result. If you hear of one, ideally that automatically shifts subscribers (like Aweber does for email), let me know?

    As for the Google Reader debate here, I use Feedly as my reader, which synchronizes nicely with Google Reader but is a cleaner interface in my opinion.

  4. Scot Hacker 11 February 2009 at 1:49 am #

    Ari – Yow! Feedly is *really* nice. Thanks for the recommendation.

  5. Andy Brudtkuhl 11 February 2009 at 9:52 am #

    I spose I’ll have to try Feedly out.. Would be a tough switch – does Feedly work with FriendFeed for shared items?

  6. Ari Herzog 11 February 2009 at 11:23 am #

    Andy, yeah, there’s a new feature which I’m calling “feedly mini” which rests on the bottom corner of every webpage. So, right now, while typing, my eyes glance down and see THIS PAGE has been added to two people have shared this on their Google Reader views, and there have been 7 FriendFeed entries. If I click the FF icon on the mini bar, it opens up those entries on a single view.

    I initially learned about Feedly last summer with a review by Louis Gray.

  7. Aaron Brazell 11 February 2009 at 11:48 am #

    I tried Feedly last year and never really liked it. Probably because I have so many feeds in GReader that it was hard to sift through it all with Feedly. Presumably, it has changed since then so maybe I’ll give it a whirl as well.

  8. Jim "Genuine" Turner 11 February 2009 at 3:26 pm #

    This is a big concern for many out there. I just recently wondered if my feeds were working correctly and they were, but I think the RSS world is being overlooked as we see the sexy and fancy migration to Twitter and other tools. Perhaps its time a new player enter the market and talk to a few of us power feed readers as well.

    I am using Bloglines, and Google Reader and doing a comparison. I have used Newsgator as well and tried Rojo for abut a day. When you read 5K feed items a day, it really can be a huge asset to have something that helps drink from that fire hose. I’m seeing a real need for the RSS world to open up again.

    Has anyone heard from Mr. Winer?

  9. Jim "Genuine" Turner 11 February 2009 at 3:27 pm #

    ..and for the record I read that second sentence to mean when b5Media WAS a good company. LOL

  10. SEO Joel 11 February 2009 at 6:26 pm #

    Wow, that is terrible. We should all combine efforts to build a new one, only problem is that I don’t have technical programming skills – lol

  11. Andy Brudtkuhl 12 February 2009 at 9:28 am #

    @SEO Joel – The problem isn’t building it – that’s relatively easy. The real problem is scaling it

  12. Shawn McCollim 12 February 2009 at 5:22 pm #

    Andy that is so true. Building a feedburner like tool is relatively easy it’s getting it to scale out that’s the problem. Friendfeed might be able to produce something if they stored the contents and not just the title and link. Friendfeed seems to be able to handle scaling pretty well also.

    As to Google Reader, I gave up on mainstream feed readers a year and a half ago and built my own web based feed reader. It’s a personal project, only scales to one person and looks like crap, but I think it’s pretty awesome to be able to read feeds more organically then via a hierarchical structure. I occasionally put out some annotations on what i’m doing on my blog. I also started taking the back end engine and play around with it at punchingsoup.com.

  13. Phil Hollows 27 March 2009 at 9:12 pm #

    Hi Aaron:

    Found your post; see http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/feedburner-alternative-blitz-your-rss.html and then please mail or tweet me (@phollows) to talk if you wish!

    Thanks

    Phil Hollows
    Founder
    FeedBlitz, LLC

  14. Joel McLaughlin 9 April 2009 at 10:19 am #

    Companies like Feedburner with massive highly technical followings need to have very redundant services to ensure their service remains superior without glitches. Unfortunate