Feedburner: A Service Yahoo Should Own
So today, I intended to triumphantly return to the world of personal blogging with this blog but I failed. My first post pushed out today was actually this one below from 2008:
Arg. How did that happen? It turns out it’s a problem with Feedburner. Feedburner was an awesome service for about 5 months (after it reached critical mass in 2007 but before Google bought it later that year). Since then it’s stagnated and for some it’s just gone down hill:
Aside from things not working, mystery outages, epic mailinglist downtime and non-existant customer service, Feedburner is simply no longer innovating at the pace that it used to. I mean look at it’s competitors: MailChimp, Feedblitz, Feedity, Rapidfeeds. Okay, its competitor Mailchimp because the others are either way too boring (Feedblitz) or too young (Feedity, Rapidfeeds) too appeal to me. Mailchimp, however is pretty damn awesome. It’s a service that that allows you to push an RSS feed out as a newsletter, styled or unstyled. Pretty useful for any blog with an audience or marketers. Secondly, most of these other services offer some basic things that Feedburner doesn’t:
1) exporting your subscriber list
2) pushing to Twitter and Facebook without a third-party applications
3) customer support by humans
oh, and how could I forget…
4) uptime
Those are three things I’m happy to pay for that Google Feedburner still doesn’t offer after two and a half years of owning the service. As much as I dislike Yahoo, I will say they have some awesome products that actually work…even acquisitions like Flickr and Delicious still work even if they have also suffered from corporate cryogenic freeze. Beyond that, most of their premier services have great customer support. Especially the ones that actually have revenue streams attached to them (lord, knows they need that revenue!) But even the things not directly related to revenue have great support: Pipes, BOSS, YUI etc. They seem to value the ‘utility’ their apps offer their customers and the brand loyalty that that builds. Honestly, I’d rather have a mediocre service like this that just works versus 20 Google projects that aren’t quite there yet.
With Feedburner, I fear Google may have another Dodgeball on their hands. A service that’s great and upcoming prior to acquisition only to become boring, buggy and frustrating after.
—
P.S. To anyone wondering what the issue was, my feed validates perfectly in every service under the sun (I tried many), but in Feedburner I get this message:
Yet, even Feedburner’s recommended validation service tells me:
What’s the deal?
Jon,
Were you looking over my shoulder this week? I’ve been looking at MailChimp myself after yet another Feedburner to Email issue. One more bonus with MC – you can add emails to the newsletter w/o having to double opt-in them. This is great if you’re bringing over existing Feedburner email subscribers, or integrating MailChimp with Salseforce or Drupal email lists.
I’ve never known a Google service to ‘lock-in’ users like Feedburner does.
Just to clarify, Feedity is not really "too young". We've been in service since 2006.
Please try out our service at http://feedity.com and contact us at http://feedity.com/contact.aspx if you have any questions or suggestions.
I suppose that's relative, indeed. Looks like a cool service, if I could export from Feedburner I'd actually give it a try.