Please Don't Kill Feedburner | Hacker News Reader

Please Don't Kill Feedburner

pleasedontkillfeedburner.com

129 pointsbjonathan54 comments

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'll continue to publish and consume feeds, regardless of what Google thinks. Lets not let them set the de-facto standards for the web.

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.

Google is using Feedburner in Blogspot. I do not expect them to shut it down without providing proper replacement. It would be absurd otherwise.

Feedburner is an optional addin to Blogger. Blogger is by no means integrated enough to hold keep Fb from being killed though.

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.

I just noticed that Chrome pops up a box asking me where I want to subscribe to a feed. Is that a new feature?

Seems ripe for another company to come in and pick up where Feedburner left off.

Business model?

How about $9.49 / month

$120 a year for rss feed traffic figures? I say go volume and increase price post-growth. $12/year.

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.

Most of my posts to g+ come because it's so easy to do from reader, that may be reason enough...

Sadly, I think Google's problem with Reader (and Bookmarks, etc) is that they don't require a g+ account and aren't "social" enough.

One of the feeds I to which I subscribe, preemptively moved off of Feeedburner a couple days ago.

http://badassjs.com/post/32738175366/moving-off-feedburner-p...

The primary reason the author was using it was for the subscriber count. He created a quick script to wrap his feed to give him counts.

https://gist.github.com/3816875

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?

See other comments regarding email delivery.

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?

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.

Bloggers are typically interested in:

- Knowing how many RSS subscribers they have.

- 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.

http://www.feedblitz.com/pricing/

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.

Google sold SketchUp to Trimble, so it's not something they never do.

While laudable, would open sourcing it be of much use? The really useful part is the service, not so much the code.

Why exactly do people like FeedBurner so much? What is it for that having an RSS feed on your blog doesn't do?

The only value I see (and why I use it), is so that I can track how many RSS readers I have.

Also interesting - RSS (for me anyways) converts really poorly. On 100,000 pageviews, I only pick up about 100 or so RSS subscribers.

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...

Well, for one, Feedburner enables PubSubHubBub support, which is pretty key for RSS-centric infrastructure.

RSS feeds -> email subscriptions. With Google branded signup and Google branded mail.

Yes. In 5 minutes, I have an email sign up form on a new WordPress install that delivers all the posts I make to all the subscribers via email.

Setting up email subscription and delivery of your RSS feed is dead-simple in FeedBurner. That's a huge plus.

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).

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.

It helped monetize your content. It provided metrics. It was pretty savvy about handling non-standard feeds. And it was reliable.

All valuable ideas for a stream based open web. Long live the open web!

I just checked http://skimfeed.com and around 30% of the feeds are coming in through feedburner.

A few big names: Techcrunch, GigaOM, Cnet, Make, High Scalability, Ted, Tutsplus, Cracked, Metafilter, Discovery, Destructoid.

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. :)

Remember to do a temporary redirect, not a permanent one, as many clients are caching the destination.

Yes, kill it.

If there is a market, somebody else will rise from the ashes.

What about all the existing subscriptions that will no longer work? That would be a nightmare for any blogger/podcaster.

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.

My understanding is that the main reason Google bought FeedBurner was a signal to pagerank. More subscribers = more influence.

Wow, they tried to jack everything about The Oatmeal's style, but did a poor job of it.

Love feedburner, but you have to wonder why they couldn't be themselves.

I don't believe this actually came from Feedburner -- this is from a blogger who uses it.

This is a bit of a stretch, it's just another one page plea.

I don't even remember what it is that feedburner does; perhaps you should have (re)sold me on the concept so as to get new blood involved.

What is the purpose of using feedburner? -> Statistics? or the possibility that users can subscribe by email to your updates?

Both.

Or you could get a feedblitz account and actually use a product that will support it's users.

I was onboard until I saw the Comic Sans font, that's where they lost me.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com