I remember reading something regarding feeds and Google. Basically in terms of numbers, they just don't feel that anyone users it. Hence why it's unavailable on Chrome. It's a shame. Feeds can be really useful. Though I'll admit they're a niche market.
I'm with you 100%. For an incredibly long time I've wanted to see Firefox assimilate the Brief extension. I especially hope they do so with all the furore surrounding Twitter.
Well, why should an RSS reader be a program be part of core Chrome, if a mail reader isn't? Google likes to push their cloud services after all. I use an addon that notifies me if there's an RSS feed on a page -- I can click on it to add the RSS to my Google Reader account.
The implications this holds for the "open web" aren't pleasant, but I'm also scared about the idea that killing Feedburner would be the prelude to killing off my beloved Reader.
If Google really isn't getting anything out of maintaining feed infrastructure, someone must see Reader as dead weight at this point.
Whilst I did use Feedburner, I jumped ship as soon as I heard they were shutting off the API. The only thing that I used Feedburner was for the subscriber count, but I've now switched the URLs around on my blog and added a little IP based tracker that more or less gives me the count.
I don't know if I just didn't 'get' Feedburner, but the only appeal for me was the subscriber count, was there any other key features that your own RSS feed cant be modified to do?
Are there any competitors in this market left? What are the key functionalities people are looking for/going to miss from feedburner? Would people PAY for these tools?
- An easy way to offer email subscriptions (off by default with FeedBurner, but available on the Publish tab).
- Offloading RSS traffic to another server.
- Having a "portable" feed address. (If they change their domain or URL structure, they won't lose subscribers because they can just adjust the source feed in the feed service without affecting the public feed URL.)
MailChimp, Aweber, and the rest have replaced FeedBurner for email subscriptions for many because they offer more control over the HTML template, help build lists for other marketing efforts, and are generally better set up to guarantee delivery of email and report on opens and clickthrough rates.
That leaves feed count, traffic distribution, and portable feed addresses (plus whatever else you can come up with). I think there's potential for another service to cover these things because there are so few alternatives to FeedBurner. I'm not convinced that people would pay for it, though, but a free tier might encourage a few to give it a shot.
thanks for the thorough response. I wonder how profitable it would be if you charged say $5/year. guess its impossible to determine, because gizmodo or gadgt could sign up and destroy your average cost per user.
Tiered pricing is probably the only sane way to go for exactly the reason you suggest: big sites will use more resources.
FeedBlitz, perhaps the only real 'competitor' to FeedBurner at the moment, uses a tiered pricing model linked to the number of email subscribers you have. RSS subscribers are free. So that's one option. There will be others.
It's an easy way to get feed subscriber analytics and set up a podcast feed. Several big sites use Feedburner and it would seem crazy to shut it down. The landing page is a bit confusing because "Adsense for feeds" the service is still working but the blog, of the same name, was shut down.
I admittedly don't use Feedburner daily but I completely understand why keeping Feedburner is a good move. It's holding up the open RSS standard and a lot of people rely on it as a service. If Google doesn't want it, they should either sell it. Which admittedly they'll never do or open source it.
RSS is only really useful as a conversation rate in communities. Take HN for example, it keeps you abreast of recent stories without having to open the page. In news sites, it's even more useful to scan the news. The conversation comes when users opt to partake in discussion.
That said, some sites do it badly, my personal experience of ARS Technica for example. I'll often see an interesting article I want to read, but then see something like "Read the other 52 paragraphs" and decide to come back later at which I never do. There's an art to creating feeds, almost like sales-people that excel at converting window shoppers into actual shoppers due to how they design their shop windows.
That happens when a blog doesn't have a well defined subject. It also happens if they aren't incentivized to go to the website, like when publishing articles in full I prefer my reader since it is consistent.
What I have found is that the few RSS subscribers I have are an excellent distribution channel on Twitter/HN/etc...
At one stage, FeedBurner subscriber counts acted a bit like a mega cheap circulation auditor. That is, if my blog said 25,000 subscribers, advertisers were likely to believe that number versus any stats I might produce myself. This was a pretty big deal for me at one point, though nowadays it's not that important at all.
Also: If you don't own the keys to your CMS (see: newspaper-dot-coms), and your CMS changes (along with the URL to your RSS feeds), Feedburner allows you to keep your RSS subscribers.
Feedburner also helps ensure a good experience for the user while subscribing to the feed. Instead of showing a page of XML or requiring the user to configure an action in the browser/system to handle feeds, FeedBurner subscribe screens show a useful page for subscribing in whatever way the user wants (especially good for Google Reader and such).
Ha ha ha. I remember a few years ago when everyone was in love in Feedburner, blissfully ignoring the fact that they were choosing to give their users a RSS (or Atom) URL which wasn't in their own domain name space which they control.
You can give users a proper RSS/ATOM URL in your domain space and still use Feedburner -- redirect "mysite.com/feed" to your Feedburner URL. People started doing this years ago as a hedge against this exact situation, so that if Feedburner went down, your users' RSS clients will still point to an address under your control. For a while it was even an unofficial Feedburner recommendation. They had a blog post about it and everything. :)
I can see why people think RSS is dead, however with services like ifttt RSS has become so much more useful.
Here are some of my more useful recipes involving RSS.
* The obvious. Getting the latest and greatest post from a small selection of high quality sites delivered to my email. (this amounts to about 4 emails a week)
* Github commits rss feed get texted to me.
* Github wiki page edits RSS feed are emailed to me.
I know I'm speaking to the choir but standard structured data is vastly useful.
I love the fact not only is it comic sans, but it's an entire image block, as if Comic Sans wouldn't render properly on everyone's machine, they created an image to make sure everyone enjoys the same Comic Sans experience.
