Feb

19

Beware of the FeedBurner

February 19, 2008 |

Mashable is running an interesting post about FeedBurner right now that highlights the trouble not only with the service itself, but also with a large number of recent Google acquisitions.

As Louis Gray noted on the weekend, FeedBurner had removed part of the FeedBurner statistics that many bloggers and podcasters heavily rely on. By now, that part of the service has been restored and it turned out that it was just a bug in a system update.

However, as Mark Hopkins notes on Mashable, this highlights a number of problems endemic with FeedBurner and other Google acquisitions:

Here’s the point: all signs pointed towards neglect of the FeedBurner system, something that isn’t uncharacteristic for Google of their acquisitions. In fact, it’s starting to become a pattern. Back in April, Dodgeball, a Twitter-like acquisition by Google was pronounced dead. Jaiku is laungishing, presently suffering full catastrophic failure due to the loss of two hard disks. FeedBurner’s near constant communication with their userbase has ground to a halt since their acquisition.

It’s a very important point to make. A large number of companies recently acquired by Google simply went dark (GrandCentral is another one). FeedBurner used to be very good in keeping in touch with users - now there is silence.

This is even more distressing because so many bloggers and podcasters have come to almost exclusively rely on FeedBurner to provide RSS feeds and feed caching for them.

At this point, when somebody asks me if I recommend FeedBurner, I have to tell them that I do - but only if they use a redirect to link to FeedBurner.


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1 Comment so far

  1. ThePete on February 20, 2008 12:43 am

    Sheesh. And I used to think Google buying things was generally a good thing.

    On a semi-side note, I use a service called Grand Central–it forwards calls to all of your phones and it’s great–for a beta. It lacks a lot of obvious features and I’ve been getting complaints from friends and family that the voicemail often never picks up and I’ve noticed that sometimes the calls it forwards to my Skype number are dropped right as I answer them. Skype isn’t owned by Google yet, is it? ;)

    And I *just* put my GC number on my business cards. Damn!!

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