January 29, 2005
Getting FeedBurned?
Here is a little story for you. Please lean back and enjoy.
Back in the days, I killed legendary amounts of time writing music and publishing it on MP3.com. For those who came in late, MP3.com used to be the place to connect unsigned artists and lovers of independent music, until in 2003 some idiots at Cnet reserved a special circle in hell for themselves by shutting down the site.
It is hard to find words that adequately describe the awesomeness of MP3.com's early years. I had people listening to my music. Occasionally someone would buy one of my albums and MP3.com would sent me a cheque which I could cash in for real money. "Money" like in "the stuff you pay other stuff with". For having people listen to my very heart and soul. How much more badass can it get?
It never occured to me that MP3.com wouldn't be with us until the end of time. I happily printed the pretty address of my MP3.com artist page on every CD I ever sold or gave away. Now imagine my degree of pissedness when MP3.com first started to rape artists that weren't willing to pay their royally priced subscription plans and finally sold out to Cnet. Suddenly my perpetual MP3.com URL was pointing nowhere at all.
In order to arrive at some kind of point, I find the enthusiasm with which sites are happily outsourcing their syndication to FeedBurner to be mildly surprising. While I crave badly for the painless feed statistics that FeedBurner offers and imagine its creator as people of utmost kindness and integrity, empirical evidence suggests that they are not going to be around forever.
By all means, think twice about handing over your feed's URL to a service you don't have any control over. I assume you enjoy being read and wouldn't want have your subscriber base go away when FeedBurner closes up shop. At the very least, exercise some damage control by having your existing feed point to your FeedBurner feed through a temporary redirect.
Once again, no offence intended to the folks at FeedBurner. Maybe I'm just being oversensitive.
Comments
I don't believe you're being oversensitive.
Hey there - Eric from FeedBurner here. No offense taken! We actually encourage people to retain their existing URLs (see http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=17 ), and we'll soon roll out something that let's people redirect their FeedBurner feed somewhere else if they're no longer satisfied with FB (or we somehow get MP3.com'd).
Please stop by the forums if you have any additional suggestions, and I hope you give us a try sometime!
Eric Lunt
FeedBurner
http://www.burningdoor.com/eric
Henning,
I raised this same point about half a year ago (Feedburner, Feed Recovery, and Feed Escrow: http://www.ideoplex.com/blog/2004/07/13.html ).I'm glad to hear that FeedBurner will be adding the ability to recover feeds.
Posted by Dwight Shih (#)
I find this quite odd as well. Shouldn't there be a relatively easy way to do this by including some sort of tracking thingy in the feed (like is dones frequently with javascsript or single ppixel gifs)?
Posted by pb (#)
The feedburner redirect idea seems to be a good one. One never knows when the unexpected might happen ( http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,63856,00.html ).
Posted by Ted Smith (#)
While CNET Networks did purchase MP3.com, CNET Networks is not to blame for the loss of all the material that existed on the MP3.com site before that sale. Without going into detail, I'll simply say that despite efforts, none of that material was made available by the previous site owners.
Posted by John Roberts (#)
@John: You are right that MP3.com's former lords at Vivendi take part of the blame. They refused to have archive.org host the material that existed on MP3.com at the time.
But looking at the MP3.com of today, or that fact that buying MP3.com without its archive was even an option, it is clear that Cnet never intended to continue operation of the site in its past form.
Posted by
Henning ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.netalive.org/swsu/nav-commenters.gif)
(#)
@pb: I thought about that, too. I wonder if FeedBurner ever thought about offering their service through a tracking bug which you could insert into your own, local feeds?
Posted by
Henning
(#)
The comparison between mp3.com and Feddburner is IMHO not very accurate. When mp3.com went offline, all published content (music) was lost as well. Feedburner is merely a pointer to your content. If your subscribers are really interested in your site, it is very easy for them to resubscribe using a feed published on your frontpage.
I do not want to rely on a service that has to spider my content to update theirs. I have through a little work and I say a little been able to track my Podcast to within 1-2% accuracy. But it took a little digging into the raw logfiles and using some database tools. Sure It took some time but I was able to determine over 5 seperate samplings exactly were my numbers lay and apply that to standard webalizer results.
Typically you are going to find approx 12-15% of your traffic is either misbehaving podcatcher clients and duplicate/partial downloads.
No I will not be subjecting my listnership to another change.
Todd
Martin, in stating that people could simply go to the front page of your site and re-subscribe to a new feed, you make the assumption that a fan of the site would have any reason to know how to find the site. A Google search may likely turn up the home of a blogger, but as was the case with MP3.com hosted bands, if the MP3.com page is the user experience a listener expects, it may be that when the site is gone (or in this case, the feed) they assume you are too.
Posted by Jake Ludington (#)
Just the same that's why I'm not switching to Gmail, despite several friends nagging me to.
(It's ironic that I say that while I'm at GMX, but that's because I don't yet have the facilities to run my own sufficiently reliable mailserver. Oh! how I lust for that day.)
MP3.com was a huge bandwidth drain which apparently operated at a loss for quite some time. Fortunately sites like garageband came up to fill the gap and at the same time provided a better business model.
The temp direct for feedburner is a good suggestion but no third party stats program will ever be as accurate as the server stats, no matter how good the program is.
This article is right, there is no guarantee that any site like this is going to be around. Heck every website is at some sort of risk. One positive sign, however, is that they do sell software (feeddemon, etc) so hopefully (for their feedburner clients) they can finance feeburner from the software and other related sales.
