UPDATE: This might be how FeedBurner handles cookies. As I primarily use Google Reader, it's likely I see Google as my default, thus making it less of a corporate issue, and more of FeedBurner making the process easier for users to stick with what they prefer. Let me know what you see. I will leave the post intact below.

Sometime around the beginning of January, I noticed a simple tweak to Google's Feedburner RSS syndication service, which favored its feed readers over that of the competition. The change no longer featured an array of buttons for web-based news readers, ranging from My Yahoo! to NewsGator, Bloglines and Netvibes.

Instead, it says simply, "Subscribe With Google", forcing the visitor to click and select alternative options, should they want to.


FeedBurner's subscription options: Before and After

The "Subscribe with Google" button leads customers to adding the new feed to Google Reader or iGoogle, an unsurprising move, given Google's acquisiton of FeedBurner last year, and no doubt further accelerating Google's market share growth in this space.

January 2007 statistics from Hitwise showed Google Reader in fourth place, behind BlogLines, Rojo and NewsGator, with 1/13th the market share of the leading BlogLines.

By September of 2007, as Richard McManus of Read/Write Web reported, using HitWise's updated statistics, Google Reader had nearly caught up to overtake BlogLines.

Now, a year after the first report, it's commonly assumed that Google's FeedFetcher, which combines activity from Google Reader and iGoogle, is far and away the leader. In fact, in my own statistics, Google accounts for more than 50% of my subscribers, more than eight times the tally from the second-highest services - a tie between BlogLines and NewsGator.


My RSS subscribers breakdown from January 22nd, 2008.
As Google acquires more independent services, and begins to tie their technology to favor their own over that of the competition, it wouldn't surprise me to see alternative providers crying foul, the way they did when Microsoft integrated Internet Explorer with Windows. After all, if RSS feeds are the way we gain information and the feed reader is today's equivalent of the mid-90's Web browser, is this not an interesting move?

See Also: FeedBurner: From Fee to Free: Should We Flee?

From Mashable contributing editor Adam Ostrow's personal site:
Thoughts on Attribution in the Blogosphere:

Some excerpts:

“Growing responsibilities” is something I think the whole blogosphere is still coming to grips with, and a reason we need people like Louis Gray, as much as it might suck to become the whipping boy for an industry-wide problem."

"... we’re already putting in place measures at Mashable to make it clearer where a story comes from when we’re not the source. For starters, we're going to phase out the “via” links that are commonly found on many, many blogs in tech space."

"In retrospect, I’m actually glad that Louis Gray called us out on the attribution issue, because it now allows us to take a leadership role in making changes for the good of the industry. Along those lines, being able to react, respond, and implement policy adjustments within 48 hours of what some people might view as a PR disaster is one of the many reasons I love being in this space. We can always do better, and hopefully this will help us do just that."

Background for the small handful of you who missed it:

The conversation starter: Mashable Uses A-List Power to Steal B-List Buzz

The update: Mashable Promises to Upgrade Linking Policies

Adam, Pete and the Mashable team, I wanted to publicly thank you for taking on a hard topic and being so transparent about working toward enhancing the way you work within the blogosphere. Your post and comments here and elsewhere were a real help to letting others know your intentions, and continually striving to improve. Greatly appreciated.

When it comes to tracking who is saying what about your blog, it's hard to beat Technorati and Google Blog Search. While the occasional site may link your way and escape both these search engines, requiring a walk through your referral logs, the two services do a fairly good job of tracking down the vast majority of reactions throughout the blogosphere.

But neither site has the full superset of referrals, so you can't simply post a link to one or the other to keep others informed to your Web presence. Also, as most companies in the real world only select a subset of total mentions as featured media coverage, you might want to highlight some of the more prominent or favorable pieces yourself, filtering out the spam links, or those less useful.

In the last week or so, I've started to build a library of posts linking my way, with the help of Del.icio.us, Yahoo!'s social bookmarking site. When I run across a site that links to louisgray.com, or mentions me by name in context, I've added the site to my Del.icio.us library, with the tag of "coverage". While it's not yet all-inclusive, and only spans the last month or so, it's a start, one I hope to keep building, and eventually, may feature in a static page on this site.

You can see this build out at: del.icio.us/louismg/coverage.

I typically tag a referring site with the "coverage" tag, and the post's main topic. Of late, much of the coverage has also had the tag of "Mashable", "Twitter", "FriendFeed" or "ReadBurner", given those topics' recent highlights here. This will help remind me when I look back at this site later just what the linked post was talking about. The date when I bookmarked it should help too.

I haven't done the best job of delivering an "About" page or other static pages, but as we find time to build the site out, one highlighting coverage will surely be coming, and Del.icio.us will share some of the credit.

Seemingly every 24 hours, ReadBurner is going about reinventing itself, through the addition of new features, new filtering and new feeds which add more weight to the service. Now only two weeks old, since obtaining their domain name on January 7th, ReadBurner underwent a significant upgrade yesterday, tailoring the site's look and feel to be less like a Google Reader clone (simply look at the logo in the top left of this post for what I mean) and more like a service ready to leave the beta stages.


The new look, including ReadBurner's new logo
In addition to introducing a new logo and style to the site and each of its shared items, ReadBurner introduced three new ways to view each shared item, ranging from the bare bones "Nothing", which simply shows the source, headline and sharers, to "Text", "Text + Images" and a "Complete" version, which includes the full post, with images and layout. Essentially, Alexander Marktl discovered how to deliver full feeds instead of partial feeds right into ReadBurner.

(See the below image for one with "Text + Images" enabled.)


Watching the site develop has been fun, and nothing is more fun than seeing the enthusiasm with which Alexander is going about improving his craft. Before debuting the new look, he gleefully sent me an e-mail yesterday afternoon, saying:

"I'm currently working on a major design update and by accident I found something that just blew me away: I've forgotten to striptags and when I'm now previewing the first lines of every item it brings up unbelievable content. Videos, Images, Logos and all somehow fits into the new design... Now I'm really excited :-)"

ReadBurner's development isn't going unnoticed. The fantastic Google Operating System site profiled Alexander and ReadBurner today in a piece, Popular Shared Items in Google Reader.

Prior ReadBurner Coverage:

January 7th: ReadBurner, In Stealth Mode, Looking to Sort Shared Feed Items
January 7th: ReadBurner's Unplanned Big First Day Shows Real Promise
January 10th: ReadBurner Goes from 0 to 12,000+ In Four Days
January 20th: ReadBurner Keeps Improving With Stats and Upcoming Items