Yet another reason why Feedburner is one of my favorite web services. They keep innovating, providing me, us, with great tools to make our content more fun, interactive, and useful, without a lot of extraneous crap.

Quite cool (although for Wordpress there was already Better Feed, a plugin which can do the same)

I think it’s great but Feedburner must give us the option to merge more than one feed in the same feedburner account or feed.

I’ve thought about using Feedburner, but what happens in a year, if they start adding something to the feed I don’t agree with. I then want to go somewhere else or run my own RSS, I don’t see how you move your feed from them without problems.

I dislike the subscription model of Feedburner. I would rather have things like e-mail, add to different blog reader links, notifying blog search engines, statistics, etc. built into my own blogging software. And it is not that difficult to build really. Why should I add a middle layer in between myself and the readers? Why should I handover my site statistics, usage demographics, email-ids of subscribers, and general control over rss refresh to a third-party company?

Chunni - for the stats? To have a uniform user experience?

Mike: It is not like feedburner is having any partnership with blog readers to get the stats. They get the stats using various techniques like looking at the referer in the http request and putting hidden images in the feedpage. All these can be easily done locally, without needing a service. The point I am trying to make is I would like to see Feedburner as a software package I can add to my blog software, not as a service that intercepts all traffic to my site. There is a big difference here.

Richard said:

“I’ve thought about using Feedburner, but what happens in a year, if they start adding something to the feed I don’t agree with. I then want to go somewhere else or run my own RSS, I don’t see how you move your feed from them without problems.”

First off, we don’t ever put anything in your feed that you don’t ask us to. Period.

Secondly, moving your feed off of FeedBurner is very simple. Check out this post:

http://www.burningdoor.com/fee.....01251.html

for more details. If you ever choose to leave, upon deletion of the feed we’ll redirect your feed traffic (issuing permanent redirects so subscribing aggregators will know to update the feed URL) back to you. You won’t lose subscribers.

Final note, we recommend using URL redirects (details here: http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=17 ) so that the URL you share with the outside world is yours; that way you retain control over the feed URL. If you choose to leave, most if not all of your subscribers will be subscribed to your version of the feed, not ours. (But if they are using ours, we’ll redirect them, as stated above.)

If this doesn’t cover your concerns, just drop us a note: we want to be a service publishers consider without qualification, and hopefully we’ve removed the risk in trying out the service.

Regards,

Rick

—-
Rick Klau
VP, Business Development
FeedBurner - http://www.feedburner.com
rickk@feedburner.com
AIM/Y!/Skype: RickKlau
office: 312.756.0022 x2012
direct: 312.239-0727
cell: 630.362.8911

Rick,

How about killing the feedemon ad on the feed page that I mentioned here? http://www.techcrunch.com/2005.....-on-trust/

Yeah, what Michael says. Kill the ad. I don’t like it. Not awful, as far as ads go, but give me the option at least.

Michael & Griffin -

Duly noted; Dick’s explanation over at KBCafe - http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20051208070037 - is indicative of where we’re headed. Specifically:

“As I’ve said in michael’s comments, the right answer is to put the customer in control and give publishers the ability to style their own landing page, and then people can promote (or demote!) whatever collection of web chicklets, desktop clients and more that they would like to promote (in addition of course to making the style sheet look more like their own brand, etc.). I think that’s the right answer, because it takes any subjectivity out of the equation. We know we need to do that. As our post announcing the new style sheet mentioned, we’ve got a couple things to wrap up and then we’ll get to this.”

In other words, coming soon. Thanks, as always, for the feedback.

–Rick

Rick - Great place to be coming from. In which case, all the power to you I say.

I also read the link’s post/comments and just for the record and this isn’t directed at anyone in particular, more of a strawman here, I am not a feedburner subscriber. I gobble it up for free.

However, I don’t think this eliminates me or anyone from stating a preference. I don’t like the ad. Hell, Rick could stick a Wal-Mart ad on there and I probably still use it. Doesn’t mean I can’t say I disagree with the decision regardless of what I pay or don’t. There’s a difference between feedback and complaints.

Perhaps not the place for this but, again, not directed at anyone, just an opinion for the record.

@11 - Lets say you move your blog or something like that. Well, you just go into feedburner and change the source feed url. All your subscribers don’t have to do anything. Or you could be like Robert Scobel and ask 9000 people to resubscribe.
Feedburner rocks.
@12 - Right, you get stats too.

Feedburner is called to be the leader of this segment but i think they can make other step in their career and give us the option to join several feeds in one feed.
I know the licenses conflicts but this can be solved.
Good Luck and thanks for this FeedFlare to Feedburner.

Thanks Rick, you answered my questions completely. Some could have just said, then don’t use our product but it’s the little things like this that make me respect a company.

Interesting to see how fragile Bloglines’ “post updated” algorithms are. This new FeedBurner service highlights it as it is rolled out. A couple of feeds I monitor are suddenly showing many “unread” items because of the new links at the bottom (including TechCrunch.com.)

For some feeds that means 50 unread items, 49 of which I actually have read.

Totally kewl. We used it on our site - thanks!!!

Kind of related to #13 is this point over at 2.0Ventures. http://2.0ventures.com/index.p.....web-stats/