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Bret Taylor to Bret's feed, FriendFeed News
We started including FriendFeed subscriber counts when we crawl your blog's feed - http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009...
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This means that, if you use a service FeedBurner, your subscriber totals will include FriendFeed subscribers in addition to subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, etc. For a lot of people like me, this will be a pretty significant boost in your overall subscriber numbers. - Bret Taylor
This is great! Thanks! - Stephen Mack
Not sure why it is called "friendfeedagg" right now :) We will ask them to make the name a bit friendlier, but the stats are there nonetheless. - Bret Taylor
What service did Kevin use to make that pie chart in the example? - Stephen Mack
Thanks again to the FeedBurner team for working with us on this one - they were incredibly responsive and great to work with. - Bret Taylor
Stephen: the chart comes from FeedBurner ( http://feedburner.google.com/fb...) - Bret Taylor
Very interesting ! - Farzad
Great! - انجل
You can add your blog to your FriendFeed profile (if it isn't already there) at http://friendfeed.com/setting... - Bret Taylor
not sure if i like it... - zio bodhisattva
There is a problem. My followers on FriendFeed follow all my feeds, not only my blog. So the "attention focus" is different between one user that follows directly my blog via RSS and an user that follows all about me. Two different counts in the main page of FeedBurner, RSS and FF, would be great. - Alessandro Di Nicola
and for the reach stats? it's crawled? - Felter Roberto
I'm not sure this was the right thing to do. Yes, there are 200 people subscribed to me on friendfeed, and my blog entries fly by in their feed. But from the Google Analytics stats, there are essentially no referrals from friendfeed to actually read the blog posts. Someone who subscribes to the blog RSS feed can be said to have an intent to actually read the blog, A subscriber on friendfeed doesn't necessarily have such an intent. - DGentry
Unfortunately I suspect we'll see a TechCrunch article soon about "How To Inflate Your Subscriber Numbers Using friendfeed.com!" Edit: like the one they wrote about netvibes http://www.techcrunch.com/2008... - DGentry
I agree with DGentry and Alessandro, this may not be a good idea. The problem could occur when Twitter and Facebook start reporting subscribers in the same way. This could start a very bad trend. - Rob Diana
Hmm, I'm not sure if I like that. It surely inflates the subscriber-stats for the Feedburner-Feeds. - Marcel Weiß
I think this is a disaster for feedburner. I publish a full feed from my blog so subscribers get the same content they would have if they visited the site. I can lump that into traffic as if they were a site visitor. But friendfeed merely publishes a headline so those friend feed subscribers have a very different experience than the ordinary RSS or email subscribers. In looking at recent traffic, only 10 referrals out of 7,000 came from friendfeed. - Doug Cornelius
I agree - I am not loving this for my feedburner stats, seems not quite right. To me it seems like FF subs are subscribing less to my blog feed and more to me and my general commentary/presence on FF. It seems a little inflationary for rss sub numbers. I prefer to keep them separate, rss subs and ff subs. - felix
but feedburner shown who "WANT" read our feed o who CAN read it? i think the second. And now it's the same. :) - Felter Roberto
I'm awaiting Louis Gray's opinion. I think he had 8,500 RSS subscribers before, and now has 13,814. Which is the more accurate representation of the number of regular readers of louisgray.com ? - DGentry
perhaps is better crawl blog's feed really show in FF. If i go out and my pc in off all the day, my google reader don't read any feed e my ff don't show me any message, Feedburner count me for FF and don't for google reader. And tomorrow, when i turn on my pc, my google reader download all the feed and i can read also the post of the day before, but FF show me only the last message and i lose all of the post. - Felter Roberto
Whoa, awesome!! FriendFeed rocks! :) My new blog at http://susanbeebe.com now has a huge potential for additional subscribers due to this great new feature FF just added, THANK YOU! :) - Susan Beebe
Wow my subscribers just jumped up 3000% - Ralph Whitbeck
What's done can not be theoretically undone - so if this is the way it is, it should stay, or our one-time blips will look odd, won't they? DGentry, I don't know if I am in love with it. I think Rob is right in terms of it rendering the number meaningless. I've been excited to see my numbers go from 5,000 to 8,000 naturally (I guess) in the last two months. This means I can't celebrate that jump. - Louis Gray
Doug said: "But friendfeed merely publishes a headline so those friend feed subscribers have a very different experience than the ordinary RSS or email subscribers." A lot of people use Google Reader in list view, which is *almost* the same thing as just seeing a title. There's no way to differentiate between those subscribers and ones which see the full content. Or subscribers that choose to mark all your items as read or just ignore them without even looking at the titles. - Tony Ruscoe
For Louis, I guess the saving grace here is that you can see the breakdown in FeedBurner and choose to ignore FriendFeed if you wish. That means you can still watch your "normal" subscriber numbers climb and celebrate hitting 8,000 subscribers naturally. (You just can't share that number in a chicklet...) - Tony Ruscoe
Tony: agreed these issues already exist for RSS subscription counts, and for web based readers such as gReader users could be counted even if completely inactive - Mike Chelen
If someone subscribes to me on FriendFeed but also subscribes via other means - are those deduped or do they essentially get counted twice? - AJ Kohn
AJ, I assume yes. - Louis Gray
They get double counted, naturally. - Daniel J. Pritchett
What if more than one user has the same feed, like Philipp and I do for the Google Blogoscoped blog feed? Does that add together both of our subscriber totals? And does it include all the subscribers for all the groups where it's been added too? (Cross-posted from http://ff.im/47QNJ.) - Tony Ruscoe
One clear flaw of this is that my wife's blog at http://www.thegrayeffect.com, says it now has more than 9,300 readers, up from 50 yesterday. That's clearly wrong. - Louis Gray
This is very bad! Of course I'd like higher numbers of RSS subscribers but this is a fake number. Please consider this again... - HowToMakeMyBlog
Louis I think thats the general problem: when someone subscribes to you on ff, are they also a subscriber to you on every one of the services you import? You import thegrayeffect.com as an RSS feed, and you have 9270 subscribers here, therefore thegreyeffect.com has 9270 new readers. More broadly, does a subscriber to the aggregate feed also count as a subscriber to every individual component of that feed? Or is the sum greater than the individual parts? - DGentry
I saw a huge jump in subscribers today. I thought that Feedburner was broken. This explains it. - Gary
Tony and Louis, the multi-author blog is one of those feeds that causes problems. I did not like this to start, and I am beginning to think I like it even less. - Rob Diana
I hope Twitter and others don't get the same idea... - HowToMakeMyBlog
Hummm. As much as I like the idea, it seems destined to provide incentive for people to beg for subscribers here on FriendFeed which is exactly the behavior that I seek to avoid, and has been generally devoid on FriendFeed to date. It rewards FriendFeed usage and - as such - helps FriendFeed grow but ... is it the *right* growth? - AJ Kohn
OK. Now I understood why my Feedburner count was inflated. I think, this is not a right thing to do. - Krishnamoorthy
I actually REALLY dislike this A LOT. My subscriber count was a great measuring stick for me and also a solid indication of how many people -might- actually be reading my content. The vast majority of my subscribers here aren't reading my blog. It's very misleading and makes the RSS subscriber count a lot more meaningless to me. - Ryan Stephens
Rob, one of the oddities here is that FriendFeed shows more than 9,000 adds to TheGrayEffect, but only about 5,000 to louisgray.com. That may be due to deduplication, but it is certainly odd. - Louis Gray
howtomakemyblog: Twitter and Friendfeed are in this regard completely different services and I therefor don't see any way in which Twitter could do something like this. But Jaiku might do it. - Horst Gutmann
I'm wondering, though: are people who hide the blog feed substracted from the number of subscribers? - Horst Gutmann
The easy fix is to disconnect my blog feed from FriendFeed. Otherwise the subscriber numbers are useless. --- So I did. That seems like a bad result for FriendFeed. - Doug Cornelius
Wow Doug, you chose Feedburner stat purity over FF conversations? That's pretty surprising to me. I suppose you can always tweet your posts into FF if you really want 'em to show up. - Daniel J. Pritchett
I just deleted my blog feed from FriendFeed... it's a stupid change really... fake, inflated numbers... it's much easier to get a FriendFeed subscriber than a real RSS subscriber. And also a real RSS subscriber is much more likely to take a look at your article than a FriendFeed one.... spammers that want to boost their RSS subscriber numbers will love this though! - HowToMakeMyBlog
I can't help but notice that Marko and Doug have 350ish FF comments each. I suppose that shades your perception of this change in a different way than it might for someone who - like me - has orders of magnitude more FF comments than blog posts. - Daniel J. Pritchett
Daniel, the fact that they have a smaller comment count should be concerning to FriendFeed because those are the users they need to keep. People like myself and more active users are not going anywhere. - Rob Diana
HAHAH - now i see what happened - i don't use my feedburner feed here for CN - but for my other sites I do - so now I see I got about 2,000-2,500 bump for those feeds today - yea, like 2,500 people coming to insidetransit every day - i wish! as Rob says, these numbers are meaningless and shouldn't be reported this way. just like the other "defaults" on some of the other services like google reader. mystery solved. - Allen Stern
Oh yeah I'm not saying FF should keep the feature as is - it's misleading at best - just that I was surprised that anyone values their Feedburner count over their FF stream's purity. - Daniel J. Pritchett
So who's really at fault here? FF for taking advantage of Feedburner's poor implementation of subscriber counts or Feedburner for offering the possibility? - Daniel J. Pritchett
Do you think FriendFeed had any idea there would be this many people talking about it? - Rob Diana
So is it better to turn it off altogether or to make it a toggleable feature that users can choose to use or abuse at their discretion? - Daniel J. Pritchett
@Rob - Who knows what FF expected, but it's really cool to see discussion evolving around this in a live FF thread. People are being mostly civil and constructive and it's all happening right here on the FF thread. I guarantee you FF HQ is reading this and staying hands off for a few hours until they can figure out a solid response. - Daniel J. Pritchett
Instead of deleting your blog feed from FriendFeed, you could just provide FriendFeed with your actual feed URL instead of the FeedBurner one. (I don't think the feed URL actually gets published anywhere by FriendFeed, does it?) - Tony Ruscoe
daniel - you cant do that - then x blog says "we have y subs" while z blog says "we have a subs" and x gets the ad deal because they have more subs, etc. sadly advertisers and agencies still don't get that the number is meaningless. - Allen Stern
@Allen - Most of us here aren't directly making money off of subscriber counts, but I appreciate that this would be an issue of great importance to you. - Daniel J. Pritchett
Daniel: No matter how active you are on FriendFeed, if you think a FriendFeed subscriber is just as valuable to your blog as your RSS subscriber, you are fooling yourself. And I am talking about value to your blog as that is what RSS subscriber number represents, not about relationships / conversations etc. you might have wit hyour "subscriber" on FriendFeed... - HowToMakeMyBlog
I think my Friendfeed network is more valuable to me than my blog's readership, but I still keep the blog around for the few unique things it can offer me: A well-developed body of work to point to in professional situations, google juice, and a place to share long-form ideas. - Daniel J. Pritchett
So if I could get Robert Scoble, Jason Calacanis and Leo Laporte to add my post-every-six months blog to their feeds, does that mean Feedburner would show I have 100K subscribers? - Ken Sheppardson
This will definitely be abused by spammers who will use it as an opportunity to inflate their RSS numbers and make their blogs seem more important to potential advertisers, readers, subscribers etc who are unaware of this FriendFeed change. - HowToMakeMyBlog
Jason Calacanis To Pay Friendfeed $200,000 For Spot on Suggested Users List - Daniel J. Pritchett
+1 Daniel - Allen Stern
There's no reason Twitter couldn't turn around and do the same thing, right? Heck, they could set up a service to automatically tweet your RSS feed over to Twitter on your behalf, then just add the number of Twitter subscribers you have to their stats. I think this is more a Feedburner fail than a FriendFeed issue. - Ken Sheppardson
Seems like maybe somebody took all the "Have you ditched Google Reader for FriendFeed" threads the wrong way... hm. - Ken Sheppardson
What about making this optional per feed? - Horst Gutmann
Ken, right now Twitter doesn't request any feeds though. Those numbers get into FeedBurner by FriendFeed providing a subscriber count in the USER_AGENT header when they request the feed. - Tony Ruscoe
I'm surprised Feedburner agreed to this. Next Twitter will ask that followers on their service count as readership. - Aviv
Aviv - that presumes that FF and FB had a discussion about this. It reads to me like FB always allowed polling agents to specify a subscriber count via their API and that the FF team just decided to change the way they utilize that feature. - Daniel J. Pritchett
If someone subscribes to your blog feed using Google Reader, it doesn't mean they read it. Likewise, if someone subscribes to your FriendFeed, they may or may not read your blog posts. Subscriber numbers are all about reach. I see no difference between FriendFeed and Google Reader. Your subscribers see what you're posting and decide whether they want to read it. Using web analytics software, you can keep track of how many people actually click-through to read your articles, but there's no way to tell how many people actually read your blog posts in a feed reader. - Tony Ruscoe
tony +1 - Horst Gutmann
Tony, you're right about RSS subscribers being able to skip over your posts at will but there's still a disctinction to be made between subscribing directly to a blog feed (traditional) versus subscribing to the totality of a person's shared activity (friendfeed). The former implies an explicit interest in the blog, the latter does not. Moreover FF makes it trivial for a user to subscribe to a person and then perma-hide their blog posts if for example you like talking to Louis Gray but not about his blog. - Daniel J. Pritchett
Tony, you have to agree that subscribing on Google Reader means at the very least that right now, at the time of adding that subscription, you have the intention of reading future blog posts. But with FF, I don't think I'm even aware of blogs maintained by 90% of the people I'm subscribed to. - Aviv
VERY cool. - Shey
Daniel, Aviv, good points. But I think that by subscribing to a person, you're generally interested in them and what they have to say. Blogs are merely a subset of that person. The big problem for me is that there's no way to verify that you own a blog feed, so (I think) it will inflate your subscribers if it's added to multiple user accounts and groups even without your permission. - Tony Ruscoe
To put it another way, should anyone in your field care that your mom reads your blog? We all know she's just doing it because she loves you, not because your blog is so gosh darned wonderful. FF subscribers in FB stats are the same thing - people like *you* and while that might carry over to a limited interest in your blog it certainly doesn't imply that many of them have ever read it. - Daniel J. Pritchett
I subscribe to blogs of people I know because of who they are (in addition to blogs which interest me) even if I'm not particularly interested in the subject they write about just in case they write something I like. The fact that I know them and like them as a person often means we've got at least one thing in common. And vice versa. I like reading lots of my FriendFeed subscriptions' blogs but I've never subscribed in Google Reader, so FriendFeed is currently the only way they can see me as a statistic. - Tony Ruscoe
Fb must count only the number of post link shown on FF, exactly how count how much feed google reader download from the blog. it's different that to use the contact number at all. it's possible? i don't know - Felter Roberto
Innovative. I don't use FeedBurner on my blog, so not seeing the effect. Still relying on the Google Reader count of subscribers. - Hutch Carpenter
Yet another great reason for a blogger to invest time in the friendfeed community! - Garin Kilpatrick
So ... if I convince other people to use my blog as one of their fed items, then I pick up the amount of people who are subscribed to them as well? Or create a new account and put a few different blogs on it and get people to subscribe. Or 'trade' a feed for a feed with others to boost each other's counts? The more I think about this, the more I dislike it. - AJ Kohn
Hmm nice. Just jumped from about 5 to 148 with tobiasverhoog.com I do think though that friendfeeders may read my feed differently than subscribers via Google Reader or another feedreader. - TobiasVerhoog.com
Rick: you can see it in FeedBurner - Bret Taylor
and another thing to add onto what Daniel has been saying: hides. if I have 10 FF subscribers but 3 of them are hiding my blog entries, does it report the subscriber to Feedburner as 10, or 7? if it's the former, then the Feedburner stats become really inflated. - chrisofspades #FForever.
also, there's nothing in FriendFeed that stops me from importing someone else's blog, which means I can artificially inflate their Feedburner stats without them even knowing I did it. seems ripe for gaming, to me. - chrisofspades #FForever.
Right, Chris. As I have 9,000 potential to add to you, I'll start selling slots for $9k. - Louis Gray
as enticing as that is Louis, I don't have a blog ;) - chrisofspades #FForever.
how does it know to link it to your feedburner? - Gary
Gary, first of all you need to be using FeedBurner for your blog feed. Each time FF requests your feed, they include the number of subscribers in the user agent string. FeedBurner then uses that number to include in the stats for your feed. (If you don't use FeedBurner, you'll still be able to see the stats in your web logs each time your feed is requested.) - Tony Ruscoe
So that's what happened.... - Spot us