Google removes FriendFeed from Feedburner stats | Hacker News Reader

Google removes FriendFeed from Feedburner stats

thenextweb.com

15 pointsBorisBomega8 comments

Or perhaps FriendFeed removed stats from their user agent?

Interesting possibility. How could we check that?

If you have a site that is being read by FriendFeed just look at the latest request. It should be in the user agent string (stored in your server logs). I've never been a FriendFeed user and can't see how to add an RSS feed or I'd do it myself.

I know some people are on the fence about whether friendfeed subscribers should be counted in feedburner stats, and as a blogger my stance is that I believe they should be included. Many people are using services like FriendFeed as an alternative to whatever aggregator.. so why shouldn't their preferred method of reading feeds be counted?

That being said I went from ~10,400 to ~8,600 subscribers today.

Could someone please explain what's goin' on here? I don't know the difference between feedburner and friendfeed. I don't use either.

Does this mean that some people aren't able to see the content they want? What exactly did Google pull the plug on?

Or is this simply the case where Feedburner isn't telling people that people using Friendfeed are reading their stuff?

Apparently the latter. HTTP has no standard for reporting "this request is on behalf of n users". Some RSS aggregators have started kludging it into their User-Agent header, but some don't, and abandoned subscriptions are still counted for a while, and nobody's auditing them, so all these stats are wrong by some unknown amount anyway.

Google/Feedburner (an RSS filtering service) would track FriendFeed (a Twitter-like service that lets you subscribe ot others' content) subscribers as a part of your total subscriber count. Now it appears they don't do this any more. This guy had his displayed subscriber count drop by over half as a result.

"This guy had his displayed subscriber count drop by over half as a result."

I think there is other stuff going on as well. he only has ~3400 friendfeed subscribers.. that doesn't explain going from 30,000 subscribers as reported by FeedBurner, to 11,000 overnight.

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