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