You would think that as FeedBurner has been further incorporated into the Google monolith, recently incorporating with Google's feedproxy, that its service would be finer tuned and could be trusted to sync up with the Web giant's other products, including iGoogle and Google Reader. On most days, they seem to do a fairly good job, getting feeds out to the various RSS readers, and reporting statistics accurately. But today, like many other days before, the two seemed to walk by one another in the hallway and not make eye contact, because we are once again seeing a decimation of feed counts across the blogosphere, chopping away thousands of subscribers from popular blogs, and for the little guys, taking them down to zero.


My subscriber count plummeted by two-thirds (at least for today)


Coalminersgd wonders if all her subscribers went away.
This miss, one in a series of misses over the last few years, also comes at a time when many are openly voicing concern that FeedBurner is asleep at the wheel, having moved its ping server without telling anyone, and adding delays between people add posts to their site and when they actually hit the RSS feed. Techmeme's Gabe Rivera and ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick have been among their most vocal detractors. Gabe said yesterday that "Feedburner lameness continues", and at the end of last month, Marshall said that FeedBurner May Not Be Hearing Your Pings.


DearRobot is clearly not happy.
In Marshall's story at the end of September, Steve Olechowski of FeedBurner said "we hear all your pings" and that "both ping servers still work", but that hasn't been the experience for everyone. Gabe said "It's inexcusable," adding "At this point, Feedburner is infrastructure" to the Web, something virtually all bloggers, myself included, use to have their content distributed. In fact, Gabe's response to Steve was quite direct, saying, "you guys broke the blogosphere, and your above verbiage reads like a bunch of evasive hooey."


TimBrownson is frustrated to the point of physical violence.
Whatever the problems are at FeedBurner, they aren't seeming to get any better with time, no matter how many times people like Gabe, Marshall and I bring it up. The company's blog hasn't been updated since May 30th, even though they've been called out for being silent before. (See: FeedBurner Quietly Kills All-Time RSS Feed Stats from February). It's alarming for some that a product that has become infrastructure and is expected to have 100% uptime continues to have such gaps and flaws. Losing one's statistics for a day is essentially meaningless, but it really makes you wonder what's going on over there.

See previous coverage of FeedBurner/Google mismatches:

• June 19, 2007: Bloggers Panic as Google Stops Reporting RSS Stats
• February 21, 2008: Google FeedFetcher and FeedBurner Miss Each Other Again

By now, most FriendFeed-o-holics have discovered the site's new ability to stream updates in real-time fashion, as opposed to the service's more static approach, displaying the point in time when you logged in. A host of bloggers have digested what some are calling "Noise on Steroids", from Robert Scoble to MG Siegler, Michael Arrington and others. While the new feature is intriguing, and could be a great tool for event live blogging, the team hasn't yet connected its capability to search or keyword filtering, which, if ever delivered, could be a body blow to Twitter search. In the interim, thanks to this gap, Twitter remains where I would go to take a large community's temperature in real time.


You can see the new real-time functionality of FriendFeed at: http://friendfeed.com/realtime.

You can even see what somebody else's feed would look like, live, by entering their URL. For example, here's mine:
http://friendfeed.com/louisgray/friends/realtime

The "/realtime" directory works on all lists, and rooms, which is great, but in my opinion, the tool so far misses the biggest opportunity, monitoring keywords, and search. Appending the "/realtime" tag to search queries and results flat-out breaks. It also isn't an option for the main, public, feed.

While FriendFeed's search engine is "live", in theory showing you the most recent comments and entries that have the keyword you are searching for, its results are completely flat.


For example, if I search for "debate" on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/search?q=debate I get results from friends. And they sit there unless I refresh again. But on Twitter, not only do I get live results from the entire planet, but I get an update saying how many hundreds more results have debuted since I first entered my query. See: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=debate


As a result, at least for me, the FriendFeed real-time capability is an interesting toy, but not necessarily useful. I already use lists to break down those I follow and march through each list one by one to participate, but scanning real time items is simply a firehose begging for full attention. And without keyword tracking and filtering, or the integration of real-time capabilities on the search engine, I'll find myself still checking out Twitter instead to see what the world is thinking.

By the way, don't get me wrong on my continued support of FriendFeed, and of Twitter (when used correctly). But I was hoping to see the integration of search with real time today, and I feel it's a missed opportunity until it gets done.

Find me at http://www.friendfeed.com/louisgray or http://www.twitter.com/louisgray on both services.

The crowded world of online RSS feed readers is one that's been dominated by names like Google Reader, Bloglines and Netvibes. But underneath that layer you have a few interesting innovative players, including FeedEachOther, and Shyftr. Shyftr came to prominence this spring, drawing attention for a shared comment stream on linked items, and has been quiet for the last few months as they worked on enhancing their platform. Today, they woke up in a big way, revamping the service, while adding an API, activity streams and widgets for bloggers.

Shyftr's main draws continue to be the same. You can add friends on the service, and see which RSS feeds they are following, or have "Shyfted". You can see who else is reading feeds that you have added, which you can do manually, or by OPML. And despite your reading your feeds in your own space, you can make comments and see them shared with the broader Shyftr community, much like other aggregation tools, including FriendFeed and Strands do. But unlike those services, Shyftr deduplicates, providing a single instance for each unique URL.

In addition to the social aspects of Shyftr, the service offers what they call a Pocket blog, the equivalent of a Google shared links blog, letting you see what friends have found interesting, as they "pocket" new items they discover.


Today's announcements set the foundation for Shyftr and for outside developers to further enhance the service. The API can tap into just about every aspect of the service, except for actually reading feeds, Shyftr reported in a blog post this morning. Among the first introductions is a new activity stream, which shows your activity, or that of your friends, as they "Shyft" new feeds, "Pocket" new items, or make comments.


Like FriendFeed and other social tools, you can filter whether you want to see "Everyone's activity", "Friends activity" or just your own activity. You can also view a single individual's stream if you like.

The last addition are embeddable widgets. Every Web service under the sun has a corresponding widget these days, and Shyftr is no different. You can make widgets for your activity stream, for a specific feed, or to show all activity on Shyftr itself.

As Shyftr founder Dave Stanley wrote in this morning's post, the development of an API was critical to expanding the site's social features, and bringing it to be much more than a passive RSS reader. While the service remains small in the shadows of giants, it has set the groundwork for growth. You can see my profile here: http://www.shyftr.com/profile/louisgray.

Sunday morning, I had the opportunity to participate in a podcast with Wayne Sutton and Kipp Bodnarf for their Talk Social News broadcast. During the discussion, we talked about how the economy could possibly be impacting Web companies, whether or not living in Silicon Valley has its benefits for tech bloggers, how to use multiple social media networks, and to still find time to take care of family and work obligations. The conversation also touched on what could be coming next in terms of social media innovations, and the accumulating pressure to perform as you become more visible. The duo also, less successfully, tried to get me to pick which companies might be in real trouble during a global economy downturn.

As I find it's good practice to listen to podcasts you participated in, to learn from them and do better in the next round, I found myself listening to the Talk Social News recording yesterday, while on the plane from San Jose to Texas, where I am staying through Thursday. Luckily, I still found the discussion interesting as an audience member.

You can download the podcast here or read their recap on their Web site. The interview with me starts about 10 minutes in after Wayne and Kipp do some upfront work.

After you've listened, let me know if you think my opinions were wrong or off base. And we're always looking for feedback. On the next podcast, what do you think I should try and get discussed?