A few months ago, a few of the guys from FeedBurner stopped by to talk with the Realtor.org team. I sat in on it as I had heard a lot about FeedBurner and I didn’t know what they offered. If you’re unfamiliar with them, I’ll just quote them from their site:
FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.
For the purposes of CRT’s blog, FeedBurner does some analysis of who is reading our RSS feeds, what articles clicked through on, and what RSS reader they are using. They also simplify subscribing for the potential RSS reading user, add “flair” like “Digg This” and “add to del.icio.us” to posts, and have the ability to mix in other RSS feeds such as your del.icio.us tags. They have a bunch of other services that include helping with advertising on your feed and some podcast tweaking that we have played with. Recently they’ve unveiled some site stats that we’re also experimenting with.
I turned on FeedBurner about a month ago so we could have some data to talk about. As of a few minutes ago, we have 116 subscribers to the RSS feed. By their analysis, most of those who read our blog via the RSS feed are doing so via on-line RSS readers/aggregators such as Netvibes, NewsGator, or Bloglines. Of course, there are some other readers, such as Google, who don’t report how many users they are pulling from, so that is a know skew of the numbers. However, it was a bit suprising to me that over 60% of our blog subscribers are reading this way. People reading RSS via an application (like I do using Vienna on my MacBook Pro) are clearly in the minority.
Another service that FeedBurner provides is the ability to have people subscribe to your blog via e-mail. On a daily basis, new blog posts will be e-mailed to those who subscribe. On the top of our blog you’ll see a link to our “subscribe” page which is a form to sign up for the e-mail delivery of CRT’s blog. Without having mentioned it, we already have 5 subscribers. It’ll be interesting to see if the numbers change now that I’ve talked about it.
We’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg with our FeedBurner usage on CRT’s site. All the services I’ve mentioned are services they provide for free to most people. There are a bunch more free services we haven’t played with as well as some for-pay services that do more analysis. Its worth the time to check it out if you want to do some more tracking on your blogging.
I think the days of the desktop newsreader are numbered honestly (though I like NetNewswire btw). My own feedburner stats bear this out, more than 70% of readers don’t use them.
Personally, I find more and more I’m reading feeds on my phone these days and a standalone app doesn’t help me there, whereas I can keep my Bloglines or Google Reader account in sync while out on the road.
The only instance I can think where an app is still be applicable is where you are without Internet connectivity for a prolonged period (like on an airplane).
Joel, I can definately see your argument there. However, as long as we have podcasts we’ll have desktop based RSS readers, as that’s all a podcatcher really is. Okay, I suppose there could be a good way to sync an iPod or similar device via a web interface, but that’s not common now.
In any case, I prefer a desktop reader for the ways it acts like a mail reader, I can see what’s been read and what hasn’t. I get color codes for if there is an update or not.
The ideal situation would be to have an online service that can sync what I’ve read and whatnot with my desktop client. So I can use my desktop client when it makes sense and a web based one for the other times.
I need to play with some of the online ones more to see if they’d work for me in reading the large amount of feeds I pull from in a way that i’m used to with a desktop client. Stay tuned for a future blog post!
What I would _love_ to see is something like the Google Desktop which already indexes Gmail and maybe even Google Reader to act as a proxy cache for their online services. This way, Gmail and Google Reader, although are 100% web based could become offline apps … How great would that be? You heard it here first!
Chris, some people are looking to do this outside of a proprietary app from a vendor. (Even if the vendor is Google, its still a proprietary way to do it.) Also, this approach doesn’t help on the mac and linux desktops that I prefer to use since the Google Desktop caching/indexing stuff doesn’t exist on those platforms. Check out the Dojo Offline API. While still in its infancy, this looks like a promising direction for any web-based/ajaxish application. This is definitely something CRT will be playing with in the future.
The cool part is that as opposed to the solution you mention (Google Desktop) it doesn’t necessarily require a proxy. However, they will be creating proxies as plugins for the various browsers (or it’ll be built in, which would be even cooler.)