Why I'm Going Back to FeedBurner (Please Check Your RSS Subscription)

After two years of sitting on FeedBurner, Google is showing some interest in modernizing its RSS management property.

Google acquired FeedBurner back in 2007. Since then, they’ve been faulted by many publishers — including me — for tolerating poor system performance and failing to keep pace with the web’s demand for faster services (see “Is It Time to Let FeedBurner Burn?“). As an experiment, I pulled this site off FeedBurner back in January, trying out self-hosting and FeedBlitz as an alternative. I was generally satisfied with both.

But now Google has decided to hope onboard the realtime web train, introducing a new protocol with the oddball name of Pubsubhubbub. It’s a new notification scheme that should make RSS much faster, and FeedBurner will support it. This effectively addresses publisher complaints regarding FeedBurner latency.

Even Dave Winer, the father of RSS, seems excited about Pubsubhubbub. So back to FeedBurner I go.

If you want to follow me via RSS, please check to see you’re subscribed to the correct URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ChrisBaskinddotcom . Or you can just click here and start all fresh and new.

Thanks to Google for hearing us out — and taking action.

Tagged as: FeedBurner, Feeds, Google, Pubsubhubbub, RSS

Dave

This is good news. I took my own blogs off Feedburner, but maintained their feed for qarrtsiluni.com, mainly because we have 75 email subscribers through that service and I dreaded having to contact each of them with instructions on how to switch to Feedblitz. Email subscribers tend to be the less tech-savvy folks, I've found.

Please keep us posted on how your return to Feedburner works out.

Denton Gentry

Is there are reason you point people to the feeds.feedburner.com address, rather than your own CNAME via FeedBurner's MyBrand option? It would make it much easier to switch from FeedBurner to an alternate service (and back again).