After months of silence, someone at Google has finally crawled out from the cubby hole FeedBurner support is now hosted in to respond to criticism of FeedBurner’s declining service.

Mashable has the full interview here, but here’s our own translated/ shorter version.

Q: Revenue for many publishers has dropped dramatically since the migration to AdSense for Feeds. What is Google doing to improve ad revenue for publishers and when can publishers expect to see better results?

A: this is all in the heads of publishers. Google is paying more than Feedburner ever did, publishers can’t count properly.

Q: Will there be a method to sell RSS ads direct from your website (assuming the user has an AdWords account)?

A: hahaha don’t be stupid, like we want to allow advertisers to deal directly with site owners. Everything goes through the Google borg, so live with it.

Q: How might Google adjust the way that RSS subscriber counts are determined to make them more accurate and prevent gaming

A: numbers are randomly generated by an algorithm. The reach of Adsense ads in feeds is the only thing that is important.

Q: When will Google Analytics be integrated with feed statistics, and/or vice versa?

A: like we’d tell you.

Q: Will Feed Statistics contain e-mail activity including forwarding and click-thru rates?

A: email is like cherry pie freshly cooked at a Mountain View bakery.

Q: What can publishers expect in terms of speed improvements – i.e. – how long it takes a feed to update?

A: clearly this is a publisher issue and not a Google/ FeedBurner issue. We process feeds faster than light, we can’t help it that incompetent publishers (most of them) throw in bad code.

Q: What do you say to those who argue having your feed managed by Google is providing your company with too much private information?

A: We offer a better experience (editors note: actual quote, not translated)

Q: There have been a number of cases, on our blog and others, where AdSense for Feeds has rendered inappropriate ads. How does Google plan to protect publishers from these embarrassments in the future?

A: Sometimes people get butch gay dating ads (well, lots of people), and we offer tools to prevent these ads. Clearly though, these are contextual ads, and lots of people write about butch gay dating.

(skip forward a few).

Q: How many people work on the FeedBurner team today?

A: none on FeedBurner alone. It’s like the baby no one wants, it gets passed from foster parent to foster parent.

Q: The FeedBurner Burning Questions blog was extremely quiet leading up to its recent shutdown and move to a standard Google product blog. Will updates be more frequent going forward?

A: we’re busy, so no, although we might indulge people with good news in the future.

Please somebody create a FeedBurner competitor, please!

Related posts:

1. FeedBurner starts to close, sadly ads now more important than feed management
2. FeedBurner Rorts: Nice numbers if you can get them
3. Technorati, Feedburner Suffer Technical Difficulties

Users have already for some time been able to swap into the Google version of Feedburner and forced switches are now on their way.

It’s sad to see FeedBurner go. I wasn’t always a fan, particularly back in the day when you were forced to give up control of your feed. They got better over time, and today they’ve become an essential part of mine, and many others blogging experience.

What Google plans to do next still isn’t clear, for example the Google backend is identical to FeedBurner so far, but you’d presume that’s going to change. What concerns me more though is the name of the Google Product: Adsense for Feeds. FeedBurner was never about the ads; sure they did offer them and many swore that they offered the best in the business. Google canceled FeedBurner’s advertising program for Adsense, perhaps unsurprisingly. FeedBurner was all about feed management: knowing how many subscribers you had, what they were clicking on, and offering additional features such as email subscription and the ability to easily add additional information (”feed flare”) into a feed via a few clicks.

The new produce sounds like it might simply be all about the ads, and little about feed management, and that’s not a change for the better.

I’m stuck on FeedBurner feeds and not about to change them, but there’s got to be a market opportunity here for a startup to offer a FeedBurner like service.

Vale FeedBurner, we will miss you.

Related posts:

1. Google Responds to FeedBurner Critics: The Translated Version
2. FeedBurner Rorts: Nice numbers if you can get them
3. Technorati, Feedburner Suffer Technical Difficulties

RSS tracking service Feedburner has dramatically reduced reported subscriptions across a range of blogs, including The Inquisitr. Zoli Erdos reports that FeedBurner is missing Google FeedFetcher stats, the number of users who read a blog in Google Reader. The usual early morning feed count update was delayed today with the service reporting 0 subscribers for longer that usual, perhaps while attempting to gather Google subscription data. We can only wait until tomorrow to see if the issue will be corrected.

Technorati at the time of writing has not updated incoming links for the last day. The oldest incoming links on a range of blogs show 1 day, and nothing newer. Incoming link counts have been affected, with data showing lower rankings for sites, perhaps showing historical data from a backup server. Allen Stern from Centernetworks noted on FriendFeed that this happens fairly regularly, although usually a refresh fixes the problem, where as today the data is just stuck there.

If we hear anything on either story, we’ll update this post.

Related posts:

1. FeedBurner starts to close, sadly ads now more important than feed management
2. Twingly: Nice Try, shame about the results
3. Google Responds to FeedBurner Critics: The Translated Version

Whether Google actually pays attention and does something about this is yet to be seen. Since they’ve given little to no attention to Feedburner since acquiring it, the likelihood is slim. Perhaps the solution lies with the way Netvibes relays subscriber numbers to Feedburner, and that’s one area where the rort may be headed off.

I haven’t tried rorting the subscriber numbers here at The Inquisitr at the time of writing, but I’m not going to judge others who feel the need to do so, because the biggest rort of all remains unreported: the standard allocation of a number of large tech blogs as default subscriptions on a wide variety of services.

This is how it works. You sign up with a service that pulls RSS feeds. Depending on the service they will automatically assign feeds into your account irrespective of you wanting them or not. You can often delete the feeds, but if you decide you’re never going to use the service again, the feeds remain in place because they are allocated to your individual account. Churn rates for services can be as high as 90% or more, so the feeds that are placed in each account, irrespective of whether they were wanted or the feed is read, count. If you allow for millions of users in and out of services that pull RSS feeds, even if a decent portion delete the suggested feed, many subscriptions will always remain.

The biggest beneficiary of standard subscription pushes is TechCrunch. Erick Schonfeld had the temerity to go moral on others in covering the Feedburner rorts story while championing TechCrunch’s subscriber count, without once mentioning the known fact that the count is inflated, grossly perhaps, by TechCrunch being offered as a standard initial feed on a range of services. I have no issue with their feed being offered in this way, it’s nice if you’re on the receiving end, but to hold others to account without recognizing the flaw in your own subscriber count really brings new meaning to arrogance. People in glass houses, or something like that.

Related posts:

1. FeedBurner starts to close, sadly ads now more important than feed management
2. Google Responds to FeedBurner Critics: The Translated Version
3. Technorati, Feedburner Suffer Technical Difficulties

Stagnation

While Digg is a popular service is its current form, any site that doesn’t evolve over time to keep the interaction fresh risks losing favor, particularly in a competitive space. Feedburner was acquired by Google for $100 million in June 2007, and the notice of the acquisition is still sitting on the front page. In over 12 months nothing much at all has changed at Feedburner, with the exception of some users getting to display Adsense ads in their feed. No Google login integration, no fresh services, nothing much at all really. Feeburner has one advantage: a near monopoly in third party feed support, and many of us use it by default, and that’s the only reason it hasn’t blead users post Google. Feedburner also proves that the price of the acquisition doesn’t matter in Google pergatory, so despite a rumored $200 million price tag, Digg could easily suffer the same fate.

Unloved

Jaiku was acquired by Google in October 2007 and since that time has remained unloved with no promotion or even reasonable support. When microblogging first came of age last year Jaiku was talked about as the No 2 in the space after Twitter, today, outside of a core few users, few use it, and even if you wanted to use it, they stopped accepting signups post Google acquisition. Not long ago it went down for a couple of days, and there were so few people left using it that hardly anyone noticed. It was rumored that Jaiku was acquired for the IP to be used in Google’s mobile endeavors, but we haven’t seen anything in that regard either. Microblogging would seem to be a natural service for Google to be in, and yet as more and more services enter the space, Google sits and does nothing with a platform that would have been booming if it hadn’t been acquired. The Digg lesson is that companies acquired by Google can be ignored and even forgotten. There is one thing for sure: Digg will never get the same amount of attention in Google as it gets now.

Ignoring existing customers

Google acquired Urchin in March 2005 and used the software as the basis for Google Analytics, the problem is that it then ignored Urchin’s existing user base for years. Urchin offered an installed, paid analytics package that was fairly popular when acquired, and a new version was actually in testing at the time of acquisition. Over 2 years later that software was released, and only then after some strong criticism. The Digg lesson is that Google loves IP, but doesn’t always appreciate existing user bases. Imagine if Google decides to use the Digg engine to power a Google service (and the rumors have Google News in the spotlight), but then completely ignores Digg.com.

Spam trap

One of Google’s earliest acquisitions was Pyra Labs, the company behind the Blogger hosted blogging service. Keeping spam off blogs has always been a battle, but in the early days it was an issue actively addressed by the Pyra Labs team. Post Google acquisition, Blogger quickly became the favorite service of spammers worldwide, in part driven by a belief that as a Google owned service, links on Blogger blogs are indexed more quickly and have more validity. Google has made the occasion noise about spam on Blogger, but the service is still one of the largest repositories of spam online, and the volume has never really decreased. The Digg lesson is that any acquisition by Google will bring attention to Digg, that may result in even more spam (the service is already a target, but they do a pretty good job in dealing with) and that Google may do nothing to address any future spam issues.

Conclusion

With a $200 million price tag you’d think that Google would look after Digg post acquisition, but as the four examples shown demonstrate, Google inaction in price agnostic. The most successful acquisitions Google have made nearly all included merging the acquired company into Google products, or using them to launch new Google products (and in both cases the original brand ceaseing to exist). The exceptions: Blogger, the favorite destination for spam worldwide, and YouTube, which Google is struggling to make money from. Grand Central is a maybe, but even that has had issues post Google acquisition.

Related posts:

1. Google Confirms Gizmo5 Purchase
2. Jaiku To Live On: Open Sourced on Google App Engine
3. Google Massacre: Google Closes Jaiku, Dodgeball, Notebook, Catalog Search; Google Video Downgraded