louisgray.com - Latest Comments in http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Ari Herzog — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:14:31 -0000

Is there a way to push selected twitter updates to friendfeed? I recently stopped pushing my tweets there, but I also push my blog posts to twitter with specific keywords...

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

1001 noisy cameras — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:26:00 -0000

Thanks for writing about it! I saw this yesterday in feedburner and I thought it was some sort of yet another temporary glitch.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Piaw Na — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:37:00 -0000

I doubt it. It takes effort to actually subscribe on Google Reader, and most of my traffic comes from Google.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Adam Singer — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:33:40 -0000

1000's of subscribers for everyone! It's sort of like monopoly money...

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Jesse Stay — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:33:00 -0000

Piaw, and I imagine FriendFeed gives higher click-throughs than Google Reader

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Piaw Na — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:32:00 -0000

Feedburner provides view counts too, but since there's no intent expressed there (people could be jus skimming), I ignore it. A click through is the only reliable measure of intent.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Jesse Stay — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:12:00 -0000

Piaw, in Google Reader you don't have to click on it to read it. There's no way to track that.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Piaw Na — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:10:00 -0000

It turns out that I get the item use numbers from feedburner about which items actually get visited (i.e., clicked through on), so I do know at least what content gets read. (I also get some information from analytics on the blog itself)

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Jesse Stay — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 22:38:00 -0000

Piaw, however, how do you know everyone subscribed in Google Reader actually reads the content? You can skim by title there as well.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Dave Stanley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:03:39 -0000

I agree. I referred to the fact that Feedburner stats are unreliable. You might as well remove it from your blog all together. It's just an unreliable number.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Piaw Na — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 20:00:00 -0000

Paul, just as an example: my analytics referral logs show that I get 97 visitors from friendfeed every 2 weeks, but the subscribers on my feedburner charts show 200+ subscribers from friendfeed. I definitely have to discount those friendfeed subscribers quite a bit! I think folks subscribe to my blog to read stuff I wrote, while folks subscribe to my friend feed (or google reader stream) to read what I read. :-)

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Paul Buchheit — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:53:00 -0000

Louis, that would have to be tracked on a per-post basis, but assuming that were possible, it would certainly be an interesting number. The example of your wife's blog is an interesting one since your followers didn't necessarily intend to subscribe to that, but I think it's a bit of an edge case. As for your subscriber numbers being a measure of your influence, I don't think you should under-estimate your influence via FriendFeed :)

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Louis Gray — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:50:00 -0000

Paul, as Jesse Stay shares posts he writes from my blog, do his subscribers also count on mine, as my subscribers count on my wife's blog?

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Jesse Stay — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:46:00 -0000

I think the numbers should be included. IMO numbers do mean something about your influence and credibility, and if they don't people will figure out very quickly. Now the question becomes how does Feedburner differentiate between someone subscribed to your blog in Google Reader that is also subscribed to your FriendFeed? I think those should be counted as one, not two.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Josh Haley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:44:00 -0000

Oh, great, now I killed your thread too? :p Of course, I'm kidding! You're the one that gave US a bump, and by bump I mean "shot out of a trebuchet".

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Josh Haley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:39:00 -0000

But of course!

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Louis Gray — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:38:00 -0000

How, Josh? FFundercats?

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Josh Haley — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:37:00 -0000

Louis, I think we all know how you got from 5000 to 8000 in the last 2 months. ;)

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Piaw Na — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:33:00 -0000

Not that I used Feedburner much, but at this point their numbers are even more bogus than they were before. Fortunately, it's easy to subtract out the Friendfeed "subscribers".

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Louis Gray — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:27:00 -0000

As the blog is not income for me, I don't rally too much around page views, visitors, etc., so at some level, the FeedBurner number offered a close measure of influence and credibility. I recognize that often the # of subscribers I have exceeds the number of unique visitors per day, etc., but I believe the problem this presents is even more great for my wife's blog than my own. She jumped from 52 to 9300 or so and she only gets a few dozen visitors a day - so her number is completely invalid.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Louis Gray — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:25:00 -0000

Paul, it just requires a different way of thinking. To date, all of us have been "trained" to assume that a subscriber has access to the feed (usually the full feed) in an RSS reader. FriendFeed offers links to my blog posts, but not the full content. I believe that the percentage of posts read by those who subscribe in a reader is greater than the percentage of posts read by people who follow me here, given I offer more than just the blog.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Paul Buchheit — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 19:16:00 -0000

Louis, I follow your blog via FriendFeed -- why should that count differently from blogs that I subscribe to in iGoogle, Reader, etc? (and in particular, if your blog weren't in FriendFeed, I would most likely subscribe in Google Reader, so the counts are interchangeable for some of us at least) WorldofHiglet, this feature has been on the TODO list forever, but some recent infrastructure changes finally made it easy to implement since the feed fetchers have access to the subscriber counts.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Doug Cornelius — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:46:57 -0000

My blog posts still get into Friendfeed since I publish blog posts to Twitter. I am not removing the content. I get very little traffic from FriendFeed to my compliance blog, so the near doubling of subscribers due to the friendfeedagg feels very artificial. That's artificial even for FeedBurner.

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Louis Gray — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:32:59 -0000

Dave, the value of FeedBurner stats has been questionable for some time, but it seems this move stomps on it. It's almost as if they were saying that they didn't matter, and then they wanted to go out and prove it. I don't agree with the move any more than I think that the Google search index spider should count as a unique visitor.

Why not also take all page views of my items on FriendFeed and count them on my stats too?

Re: http://blog.louisgray.com/2009/06/friendfeed-sneaks-into-my-rss-stats-and.html

Louis Gray — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 18:31:41 -0000

The reach count in theory shows how many people actually saw your feed through its distribution each day, and that is a subset of the total visitors to a site. People have been raised to look at the shiny FeedBurner chiclets and guess a site's authority as a result. This just bumps up our numbers. And my wife's blog might as well just remove it altogether.