Is FeedBurner Pushing the Envelope on Trust?

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1. Dan
   

   December 7th, 2005 at 11:46 pm

   I think it’s extremely dangerous that so many people are centralizing all their feed handling with one company. Giving away a huge amount of control just for some stats…

   They seem like nice guys, but I’d never trust such a key part of the infrasturcture to one company. If they don’t like sometihng, it could kill future innovation.

2. Niall Kennedy
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 12:07 am

   The link was there before. FeedBurner is a FeedDemon partner and was one of the only companies to have a custom version of FeedDemon back when BradSoft played around with the idea.

3. Panayotis
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 12:27 am

   I’m a big fan of FB too. I do not think this is an ad in the commercial sense (even though they are probably makeing some money out of it). I think the idea is to give the option to anyone who is not aware what a fedd is or how to use it to download a good feed reader.

   Of course, they could have a link for RSS Bandit that is an Open Source project… or an other free RSS aggregator.

4. Kevin Burton
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 1:46 am

   It’s been there for a long time now.

   This is more product placement.

   The only thing that really concerns me with FeedBurner is a feed outage due to their having a network issue. Of course we already have this with TypePad, Blogger, etc.

   Kevin

5. Deepak
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 2:21 am

   I started using Feedburner recently, but am keeping a watchful eye. The service is certainy very useful, but the margin for error on their end is very small. I hadn’t even noticed the ad until I just looked

6. Peter Cooper
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 4:00 am

   There’s actually a trivial way FeedBurner could stop serving all the feeds from their own infrastructure, let users serve their own feeds, yet still get all of the benefits of FeedBurner’s services/stats/etc. I’m intrigued as to why they haven’t implemented it yet.

7. pmtracker
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 5:31 am

   This is something like having banners in your website inspite of having paid account. No wonder why the user hates such things.

8. Juan Luis
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 5:37 am

   What´s really the difference between this link and the Bloglines/Myyahoo etc… logos.
   It only gives more chances to the potential suscribers, and I don´t think it could be defined as advertisement.

9. Frank Gruber
   

   December 8th, 2005 at 5:48 am

   Niall is correct, that link has been there for quite sometime but I think the redesigned templates draws your attention to it because it is a little different layout so you are not used to seeing it there. I trust FeedBurner but understand your concerns.

10. lalala
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 6:46 am

    Peter, because it ties you (website owner) in more with feedburner, duh..

11. Randy Charles Morin
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 7:08 am

    You said “This page should be all about getting new subscribers to the publisher’s feed.” Considering that most Web users don’t have RSS clients installed, providing a link to download one would fit the description of “getting new subscribers to the publisher’s feed.” No?

    http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20051208070037

12. Ed Dunn
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 7:21 am

    I see nothing wrong with this. FeedBurner is involved in proliferation of their business (client download?) by reinvesting in their own distribution system (their link system).

    It would be a different story if they were pushing ads but they are only pushing their business which is necessary for them to thrive.

13. Dick Costolo
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 8:06 am

    Hi Mike, Niall has this right, complete with historical accuracy; however, your point that we need to be careful with Trust issues is one we take to heart, and the best way of dealing with these issues is ALWAYS to put the customer in complete control. As we mentioned when we launched this, one of the things we’re going to provide as soon as we can is the ability for publishers to private label this style sheet completely. It’s not a lot of work to provide this, we just have to get it done in concert with a few other things we’re working on. We spent a lot of time discussing the new style sheet and whether we were excessively promoting web-based aggregators at the expense of others, whether we should rotate the chicklets, whether USM was weighted correctly, etc. We obviously have grown to the point where one size no longer fits all on the style sheet and we need to open that up. Working on it.

14. Davak
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 8:29 am

    We have been debating about this same issue regaring our upcoming service. How do you eventually go from “nice guy” to profit?

    I believe giving people a ton of notice in advance is the best plan. You give the users time to change if they wish. Then when it finally occurs, everybody has been warned.

    Trying to roll it out quietly under the radar doesn’t seem to work.

15. Klim
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 9:44 am

    I haven’t got anything against a small ad to get a newsreader… seems small and rather logical to me.

    What made me raise eyebrows is the sudden inclusion of other feed material in my FeedBulletin (I don’t remember being notified). This morning I recieved 6 product entries. I watched this feed for a long time, and this is the first time they have stuck in advertisement. I don’t know how this is set up as I can’t find any mention on Feedburner’s site, but they appear to be targeted at the content of my feeds (being video… so I got Ulead Studio and Sony Digital Video Walkman). So now I gotta dig through the ads to see problems with my site, or updates from Feedburner. This is going to make me ignore the feed…

16. Jeff
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 9:44 am

    This is the partnership between Newsgator and Feedburner in action… Brad Feld invested in both companies.

17. Dick Costolo
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 9:49 am

    Klim, we onlyuse FeedBulletin to communicate feed validation errors and copies of responses that we email out to publishers who email about a feed question. Please shoot us a note directly if you see something in there that looks strange to you, and we will take a look at it straight away. There should be nothing else in your FeedBulletin.

18. Cody Williams
    

    December 8th, 2005 at 2:26 pm

    Just wanted to comment on something you said:

    “Publishers invest a lot when they decide to go with Feedburner - they turn their feed URL over to them and it’s not trivial to switch away.”

    For every site I have made where I use Feedburner - which is most of them - I use a local address, such as mysite.com/rss/, and use .htaccess to redirect this URL to the feedburner address.

    At any time, I can switch from feedburner to whatever I want, without my users having to update their feed addresses. I consider this the best way to handle the feed URL, and am surprised more people do not do it this way.

    As far as the Feedburner advertisement, while I don’t really mind what it is now, it is a slippery slope - any more and I would be offended.