Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo emailed Richard MacManus and me on Monday to give us a preview of what he calls “broad enhancement to our stats” that are being released later this morning. I’ve had a chance to review the new functionality (screen shot below) and I agree that these changes are both needed and useful. The key change is to give users more information on what items in feeds are actually getting “viewed” and clicked on. Until now bloggers could not get this information – analytics services like MeasureMap and BlogBeat give us good insight into what’s being done on the actual site, but unless a click through to the site occurs from a feed, there was little or no information on what was actually being read off site. FeedBurner’s new stats go a long way toward mitigating this problem. They are also showing what they call “uncommon” sources which allow bloggers to see where their feeds are being read and re-used beyond the standard RSS readers like Rojo and Bloglines, and new tools for podcasters to track downloads. Dick summarized all of the new features in his email: The new features are: a) Uncommon uses. We track 200k feeds and so we see everywhere feeds are used regularly. When we see someplace a feed is referenced or clicked that we don’t recognize as a common reference, we highlight it here in the dashboard and on the detailed uncommon uses page. Could be a cool little newfilter somebody wrote, could be a blog somebody assembled from feeds, could be a cool little web-based aggregator we’ve never heard of, could be blog spam. Whatever it is, we’ve found that publishers love to see these unique uses and references and that it’s very helpful to have something like feedburner that can leverage a broad base of common references to point out the uncommon ones. You can then “whitelist” or “hide” references you already know about (note that your own site will be an uncommon reference, whitelist that one right away), and you’ll never be Alerted to whitelisted domains on your dashboard again. b) Better integration of item stats and feed stats, better clickthrough to items for more details c) Reach! Now we start to give you an idea of what percent of your subscribers actually looked at or clicked on one of your items today. This is step one. We will spend → Read More

FeedBurner is launching FeedFlare tonight – a group of web services that can be integrated by the publisher into her/his feed. FeedFlare is located under the “Optimize” tab within the FeedBurner dashboard. FeedBurner is also releasing a full set of open APIs to allow third party developers to build and integrate customized services. Give your subscribers easy ways to email, tag, share, and act on the content you publish by including as many or few of the services listed below. FeedFlare places a simple footer at the bottom of each content item in your feed, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around your content. If a publisher chooses to include one or more services, they appear at the bottom of the feed. Currently offered services include: Email this – Send a link to your item to someone via email. Email author – Allow subscribers to email you directly. Technorati Cosmos – Display the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. Del.icio.us tags – Lists del.icio.us tags for an item. Save to del.icio.us – Allows subscribers to bookmark the item with del.icio.us. Count comments – Lists the number of comments posted to an item (for WordPress blogs only). Creative Commons – Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed or post. I’ve added a number of these to the TechCrunch feed. Just look to the bottom of any post, within the feed or in a feed reader. The really interesting part of this announcement, however, is that FeedBurner is opening up the API and allowing anyone to build in their own services. Del.icio.us competitors, for example, can build their own version of this and promote it to publishers. Or entirely different types of applications can be built. I like having interactive services like these being built directly into the feed. Richard MacManus has more. → Read More

I’m a big fan of FeedBurner and write about them often. I’m also a “pro” subscriber now and pay the $5/month for that service, which I think is more than fair given how much value they add. I like having the insight into RSS analytics, and FeedBurner has never broken on me. I also consider many of the Feedburner guys friends. Even Dick Costolo, the CEO, has helped me personally with some issues in the past. In short, I support Feedburner. Yesterday Feeburner announced some new features on the RSS Feed landing page that are designed to make the user experience a step better than before. The functionality includes storing user preferences for RSS subscriptions, a cleaner layout, and a preview feature for podcasts and videocasts. All good stuff. Frank Gruber writes about this on his blog as well in glowing terms, and in general I agree with him – these are nice features. But…Wait. What’s this Advertisement? In looking at the new feed landing page I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed before. An advertisement. It’s just a single line of text – “Download a Free Trial of FeedDemon 1.5″, with a link that begins a download of FeedDemon. I don’t know if it was there before or if this is a recent addition, but I don’t like it. This page should be all about getting new subscribers to the publisher’s feed, not generating revenue for Feedburner. And particularly if the publisher is a paying “pro” member. It’s just one ad now, but this is a slippery slope. 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. Feedburner, perhaps more than most web 2.0 companies, needs to be very careful with trust issues. → Read More

Feedburner released important statistics on their service yesterday. If you are unfamiliar with Feedburner, check out our original profile. The graphs show total feeds managed by feedburner and total subscribers to those feeds. Both show hockey-stick like growth that looks similar to data released by Technorati (see item no. 2 in a past TechCrunch weekly summary). I believe that these stats are very relevant to the blogospere in general. We are in a steadily increasing tide, that is increasing at an increasing rate. All boats are rising. Feedburner now manages about 100,000 feeds and about 4.3 million people subscribe to those feeds. The growth rates are obvious: Paul Kedrosky notes that the number of feed subscribers is doubling approximately every 60 days. What I’d like to know is what percentage pay the $5 per month for the Pro product. If it’s around 5% (that’s my guess), then FeedBurner revenues (not including advertising) would be about $300,000 or so annualized. The only thing left to ask is, do you have your FeedBurner sticker yet? I do. We’ve previously written about Feedburner on September 7, 2005, July 15, 2005, July 4, 2005 and June 14, 2005. → Read More

Last week, FeedBurner announced a significant redesign of their site. I didn’t post on it right away because the basic stats functionality remains the same. People are generally quite happy with the change. And I have to say FeedBurner is one of my favorite tools – without it I would have a very difficult time understanding how much of our traffic was coming through our RSS feed. Overall, however, though I don’t think the redesign was a success. I am finding that I am clicking (and waiting) much more often than I was previously to find the stats I care about (24 hour recap and item readership stats). Too much information is available only through secondary pages. A better information architecture would make that information more readily available. I also think the site is a full generation behind the state of the art – adding ajax would speed things up somewhat and significantly reduce necessary clicks and refreshes. Some of the applications I am beta testing quite frankly make FeedBurner look very bad in comparison. fiftyfoureleven has additional thoughts as well. I am a big fan of FeedBurner, so take this criticism very lightly. 99% of what they do, they do extremely well, and frankly that is (mostly) all that matters. We’ve written previously about FeedBurner on July 15, 2005, July 4, 2005 and June 14, 2005. → Read More

Company: FeedBurner (BuzzBoost) Location: Chicago Previous Profiles: June 14, 2005, July 4, 2005 What’s New? FeedBurner has been launching a ton of new features lately, and BuzzBoost, announed on July 11, is worth noting. In their own words, “Enter BuzzBoost. It’s the latest publicity and awareness offering for FeedBurner publishers, and it’s free. BuzzBoost’s job is to redisplay your feed content anywhere you can copy and paste a short snippet of HTML code — in a Blogger or TypePad page template, on a corporate website, or even in a “signature” block on a message board. BuzzBoost code is just a short line of JavaScript that displays content items and information from a FeedBurner feed according to settings you provide. You get to control how BuzzBoost displays the following elements: * Feed Title * Item publication date * Individual item headlines, headlines and plain text, or headlines and original HTML * Plain text item excerpt length * Link to download podcast enclosures (if available) We know that publishers who are familiar with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) would also want to precisely control the styling of whatever BuzzBoost generates. Therefore, BuzzBoost has the right hooks in the generated HTML to make sure you can style each of BuzzBoost’s elements, which we have documented (see the links at the bottom of this post.)” Link Tris Hussey at Qumana posted about this a few days ago and saw the power of it immediately – you can cross promote blogs, and use any RSS feed in new ways. For instance, Tris is thinking about taking RSS feeds of prospective search queries and promoting them through buzzboost – very creative! This isn’t new technology, it’s just a very easy and cool implementation. Feedburner will create an html script for you based on your parameters, or you can take the source html and entirely customize it. To use it, if you already have burned feeds at Feedburner, click on “publicize” from the control panel area, and choose “buzzboost”. You can then select certain parameters, and choose a standard snippet or take the html and edit it directly: snippet: full Code: Here’s how it looks in action: Subscribe to RSS headline updates from: TechCrunchPowered by FeedBurner Relevant Links: Tris Hussey line of site Brad Feld java girl Blog Sites Net Tech Based Marketing quick online tips Tags: feedburner, buzzboost, rss, techcrunch, web2.0 → Read More

Company: FeedBurner Location: Chicago Previous Profile: June 14, 2005 What’s New? Feedburner had a “Hackathon” (see Joe Kraus on hackathons) day last Thursday, where engineers dropped their projects for a day and worked on new features that could be designed, implemented and tested in a single day. They came up with seven new features (link): – Ping Server – alert FeedBurner that your blog has been updated and would like FeedBurner to update your FeedBurner feed now, instead of waiting for the normal 30 minute auto-renew. – Geotag Your Feed – add geographic position to your FeedBurner feed. – Title/description Burner – allows you to change the title and/or description of your feed without changing anything in your source feed or in your blogging tool. – FeedMedic – notify you of any errors FeedBurner encounters when regularly processing your source feed. – Javascript Circulation Ticker – with Awareness API enabled, allows you to get a daily ticker to place on your blog, displaying whether your circulation is going up or down. – ImageCast – enhancement to SmartCast service beyond audio and video enclosures. – StatsTracker Dashboard Widget (Mac only) – view your feed’s circulation with the new StatsTracker widget for Mac OS X Dashboard. Our favorites are the new ping server (the weblogs.com ping server will be profiled here soon) for fast updates, and the circulation ticker (neat tool to put on your blog). I’m trying to dig up a mac while Keith is on vacation to try out the statstracker widget. Links: Blog Marketing Loop Tags: feedburner, hackathon, RSS, web2.0, techcrunch → Read More

Company: FeedBurner Location: Chicago What is it? FeedBurner is a service that takes a normal, everyday RSS or Atom feed of any kind and turns (burns) it into a FeedBurner feed that you can then distribute to readers for use in any RSS reader. The company currently hosts more than 60,000 combined RSS and Atom feeds for over 40,000 content publishers. The company’s hosted service currently processes over 5 million daily views of RSS content including podcasts and video weblogs. One reason a blog or website owner would want to use this is because it simplifies the RSS feed. The Feed URL for Techcrunch, for instance, is “http://feeds.feedburner.com/Techcrunch”, which is a much simpler format that standard RSS feeds. Also, most blogging software offers a variety of RSS feeds – Atom, RSS 1.0, 2.0, etc. Sometimes these feeds don’t work properly with some readers. And if a site can get most of its readers to use the single Feedburner feed, they can take advantage of the great statistics and tools to see where readers are coming from and what they are clicking on. FeedBurner offers two services – a free version and a Pro version that costs between $5-$16 per month depending on the number of feeds managed. The stats for the free version are great, and the pro version also shows more detail and a “who’s syndicating me” feature. The Pro version has a 15 day free trial. The big reason for using FeedBurner, however, is that it can automatically add Google Adsense adds to your feeds, allowing you to easily generate revenue if you have a large enough audience. There are a number of influential bloggers who don’t like this service, however (and other aspects of FeedBurner as well) – see Relevant Links below for more information. One drawback to FeedBurner was the difficulty in turning it off and moving your feeds off the network (while retaining your audience). The method for doing this was complicated and clunky (or required you run your site from your own server) and so many top bloggers stayed away from their service. However, on June 10, 2005 FeedBurner announced (this is the FeedBurner blog) a new feature to allow easy transition away from FeedBurner whilst retaining your readers. Nice move. So FeedBurner offers ease of use, great stats, revenue AND a relatively painless way out. Thumbs up from TechCrunch and that’s why we → Read More