DISQUS

Jesse Stay · 5 months ago

As I just mentioned in my reshare, I agree wholeheartedly.

DGentry · 5 months ago

> the new number of about 14,000 listed on my blog ... represents the maximum
> potential people who would see my content if everybody who subscribed ...
> on RSS or FriendFeed actually kept their subscription going and active.

The potential is even higher since you tweet every post. I suppose people who watch your delicious.com link history are potential subscribers as well, though I don't think that is a common way to use delicious.

I didn't agree with friendfeed's decision to pass along subscriber numbers in their feed fetch. If friendfeed had done it from the beginning my opinion would likely have been different: the number would have grown slowly and not drawn attention. As I'd been on friendfeed more than a year when they started doing this, there had been enough time for the Google Analytics data to sink in: relatively few people click through links on friendfeed. The link either passes by unnoticed, or (sometimes) people read just the title and then start commenting.

AnneHaynes · 5 months ago

I guess I'm the "few" I read all of the friendfeed links that look interesting and when I like something it sends to my twitter, so this is when I wear the velvet gloves.

ZuDfunck · 5 months ago

Solid, as always, insight Louis!
I don't know what I would do without you sir!
If all the numbers are skewed
Maybe we should all just focus
on the Big 'C"
CONTENT!

Webomatica · 5 months ago

Totally agree. But in an odd way, aren't we going back to where we started? We used to say - put up a web page, theoretically, everyone - anybody with Internet access - can see it. You have a potential audience of billions. But at the end of the day everyone who starts a site realizes that actual visitors is another story. So lots of time was invested with search engines and such to get people to actually visit your site.

Now we have a new "WWW" of Twitter and FriendFeed followers with the potential to visit a site, and cycle begins anew...?

authorityseo · 5 months ago

My favorite are the Twitter emails I get showing the new people following me on Twitter who have a thousand followers and 2 updates. I bet those thousand people are just loving the two updates the profile has.

GrowMap · 5 months ago

Thank you for the heads up on this change. Although I subscribe to worthy blogs I very rarely read them in a reader. I finally put my favorites in a separate section at FriendFeed and built a MyAlltop page and use those. Other than that I read what comes across Twitter and cliKball but not FriendFeed so much lately although I do still share my best finds there too.

maverickny · 5 months ago

I was wondering why two old blogs on Blogger suddenly gained 500 odd subscriptions, so thank you for the explanation, Louis. What I did find odd was that nothing happened with the RSS subscriptions on my main blog at Typepad, where the subs would have been more appreciated.

Guess you can't win 'em all.