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Several months ago, b5media made the choice to move all our feeds to Feedburner. We had actually been looking to do this for awhile, but there were a couple things holding us back. Portable feeds and money. Both of those things were resolved around the middle to end of September.
Over the past few months, we’ve experienced a lot with Feedburner and I wanted to reflect a little on these issues. Our experiences have ranged from stellar to very poor and as a result, I’ve been in close contact with the Feedburner team since.
Actually, I was going to write this post privately but Rick Klau indicated he didn’t mind a public post. Rick’s a good guy despite his bleeding heart liberalism. Really. He’s a good guy. Really. I mean it. He’s a good guy. And he’ll try to get you to vote for Barak Obama. But he’s a good guy. ;-)
The Overview
As I indicated earler, one of our biggest fears in moving to Feedburner was that we would be locked into feedburner branded feeds. Feedburner branded feeds aren’t so bad except for two things. One, we lose our ability to brand the URLs. Two, if we ever went to a competitor, we couldn’t take our feeds (and thus our subscribers) with us. Fortunately, we worked it out that our standard WordPress feeds (click on the Subscribe Link above) redirect to feeds.b5media.com Feedburner feeds. Excellent. Should we ever decide to go to Joe’s Feed Kitchen instead, we can redirect feeds.b5media.com over to Joey and not lose our subscriber base.
Over the past few months, we’ve gotten pretty efficient at pushing Feedburner’s limits. For instance, we like that we can use the Feedburner API to “burn” new feeds directly from our automated blog installer. There are significant problems with the API, but this one works well for us.
We have also implemented channel feeds for each of our channels and a megafeed for the entire network. Neither of these are publicized yet, but they will be. In the meantime, we are using the channel feeds to power the Random Channel bit over on b5media.com.
The Cons
Overall our experience has been a positive one. Therefore, I want to leave you with a good taste in your mouth. So I’ll do the Pros last and instead, start with the cons.
First, the API.
We’re a special bunch at b5media. We have needs that can’t be itched with the normal corner store “itcher”. One of those needs is the ability to not only add a feed (which we can do), but also to add features to a feed like, um, Pro Stats? I’d also like to have API to add a feed to the FAN (Feedburner Ad Network). Again, it’s our itch. All our blogs get Pro Stats. All our blogs go into the FAN.
Secondly, the “My Networks” feature - which is new - is a bit lacking. My Networks is how we create our channel feeds. The concept is simply a network of likeminded blogs. In a more mainstream situation, the implementation is fine. But there should be an advanced tab/screen for those of us that have itchy stuff. For instance, when adding a bunch of blogs to a Network feed, it would be nice to add multiple blogs at a time.
In case the Feedburner folks are listening, your blog listing is very slow in syncing to the rest of the account. When I add a blog in the network, I should immediately see that blog as an option to add to a network. The API also comes into play here. Can’t we add a blog to a Network by an API call? Wouldn’t this be a good thing to tie into the Feed Foundry (Enterprise Feedburner where bulk changes can be made)? I mean, labels assigned in Foundry should be able to get their own feed too, yeah?
The Feed foundry, which I just referred to, is incredibly sluggish. Half the time, queries fail. Too much AJAXy stuff, I think. The UI is poor. The ability to create reports is kludgey. This needs significant improvement.
The Pros
Overall, Feedburner has been a dream. Customer service has been next to nothing. Did I mention that Rick Klau is a good guy? Responsiveness has been phenomenal from their support team. I met with Brent Hill at Ad Tech and he too is a good guy!
Feedburner provides an important service for integrating feed related services. It gives us a birds eye view of how the network is performing in the feed arena and provides some nifty tools for integrating some of our much utilized services.
Overall, very impressed. Hopefully, the guys can address those few issues and we’ll be golden.
Stumble it!
About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He served as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.
That’s Barack with a ‘c’. Get the name right, already. He’ll be your president before you know it. ;)
On the feedback front, really appreciate the candor. We strive to excel in every aspect of what we do, yet there’s always room for improvement. You guys have definitely pushed the envelope, which is helping us improve.
Here’s to a long and productive relationship! (Who knows, maybe even well into an Obama administration!)
;)
–Rick
Barack Obama as President is truly frightening. Then again, so is just about anyone else as President. But I digress.
This is valuable information for those people who are planning to run hundreds of feeds through FeedBurner. But much of it doesn’t really apply to those of us with, say, four or five. I don’t think that was terribly clear, though I figured it out from context.
[...] Aaron has posted a good Review of Feedburner over at his blog which might be worth a read for those looking for an RSS feed solution. If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to the Free ProBlogger Newsletter [...]
I like the “redirect to feeds.b5media.com”; a very elegant solution.
(I’d just like to highlight that for anyone who’s scanning this article)
Totally agree with the review. I’ve been using their services for quite some time now and all I can say - Feedburner rocks (although there’s some cons just like you said).
I can’t speak highly enough of FeedBurner’s customer service, and all the help I’ve received from the team, especially Matt Shobe. He’s a good guy too!
Michael: I’m not trying to sell anyone on FB so much as doing a review of how we have felt about them - which of course is subjective.
[...] Over the past six months, FeedBurner has tripled its available advertising inventory for blogs and RSS feeds. This has been driven by the participation of 20 blog networks that publish 1,500 feeds, reach more than six million feed subscribers a day, and generate millions of page view. Of course, b5media is one of those networks, and our very own Jeremy Wright was quoted in a recent FeedBurner press release. “We’ve experimented with smaller blog advertising solutions but none have come close to FeedBurner in terms of the blue-chip advertisers they are able to attract, their incredibly useful feed publicity and measurement services, and a customer service level that is unmatched. Our bloggers couldn’t be more excited about the revenue opportunities and the exposure they are receiving as a result of being in FeedBurner’s ad network.” Aaron Brazell has played a huge role in developing a close relationship with FeedBurner. His post on the pros and cons of FeedBurner (which received FeedBurner’s blessing) can be found here. [...]
[...] Aaron Brazell is the Technology Manager for b5media. He gets to deal with all the technology that runs the blogging network, and has put up a post on his personal blog, Technosailor, about his experiences with Feedburner, an RSS tool that b5media recently switched their feeds to as it allows tracking and statistics. one of our biggest fears in moving to Feedburner was that we would be locked into feedburner branded feeds. Feedburner branded feeds aren’t so bad except for two things. One, we lose our ability to brand the URLs. Two, if we ever went to a competitor, we couldn’t take our feeds (and thus our subscribers) with us. Fortunately, we worked it out that our standard WordPress feeds (click on the Subscribe Link above) redirect to feeds.b5media.com Feedburner feeds. Excellent. Should we ever decide to go to Joe’s Feed Kitchen instead, we can redirect feeds.b5media.com over to Joey and not lose our subscriber base. [...]
I love feedburner… I moved from blogspot to wordpress, and managed to shift over all my subscribers in a blink of an eye :)
nice job, aaron. it was fair and it provides FB with a lot of insight into what their users think, want and need.
[...] Aaron’s review of FeedBurner has popped up on Techmeme.com, which tracks the biggest stories in the high-tech industry. It’s not too surprising given the number of comments on his blog, as well as Feedburner’s strong growth in recent months - fueled, in part, by b5media. Congrats, Aaron. [...]
Excellent post. You are right on the spot. I use Feedburner and it has been great!
I had an issue with one of my feeds not being recognized and the customer support I received was stellar. They tried to help me in every way possible, even though the issue ended up being a DNS error with my hosting provider. Makes me glad I decided to go with them.
This is great feedback, Aaron. We have a big Foundry rev planned to start in a couple weeks, and I think that some of the things you look for in the API will/should also be available in Foundry. Things like “add all 200 of these properties to the FAN”, etc….you should ultimately be able to choose whether you want to use the API or the Foundry UI for some of those “bulk feed management” tasks.
Hey Dick,
Thanks for hopping by. Rick was teasing me with a few of the enhancements this morning. Looking forward to seeing them.
-a
Don’t forget about putting your comments through Feedburner as well.
What Feedburner really needs is a service for subscribing to individual comment threads via email so you don’t have to put your domains at risk, but then the emails would have to be a little more frequent compared to the daily updates
[...] Review of Feedburner » Technology, Blogging and New Media Here is a handy review of Feedburner from the perspective of a fairly large blog network, b5 Media. (tags: rss feeds feedburner b5media blognetwork) [...]
I like Feedburner’s capabilities but their interface could use some help. I had a hard time finding out what exactly things like “link splicer” would achieve.
As well, I fear for feed analytics companies. As RSS becomes mainstream, aren’t the big boys (web analytics) simply going to add this functionality and swallow them up? What’s the future of feed analytics?
[...] As you may recall from my previous post about Feedburner, I like it when they apply API to their services. When asked whether Site Stats has API, Rick Klau said: Not at this time, no [...]
[...] and in fact, selection of stories for headlines is seemingly arbitrary. For instance, my review of FeedBurner some time ago was picked up by Techmeme but another FeedBurner story - the one about Google Reader [...]