Techcrunch has been bemoaning Feedburner's deteriorating service for a few weeks now. Others are complaining about it all over the web. Why hasn't anyone announced a competitor service offering feed analytics? Is it a tricky service to duplicate? Hard to make money from? Fear that Google will turn their act around and smite you?
I think the money issue is the most pressing. The way I see it there’s a couple problems.
1. Even though feeds are fairly small and easy to serve there’s got to come a point where you have so many users that even their small feeds begin to cost significant money. Feedburner not only has to check the host feed often but serve all the subscribers who poll as often as every 5 minutes. That’s a lot of bandwidth and a lot of server power.
2. With free analytics services all over the place it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to make money on a subscriber model which leaves ads as the only viable revenue stream. But for that to work you need a decent ad network behind you and you can’t very well use adsense
With that said, I'd think it a fairly easy service to duplicate. All Feedburner really does is read your feed and then repackage it while logging the pertinent data from the subscriber http transactions and sticking it in a database. Since every modern language I can think of has free libraries for reading RSS/Atom feeds and logging transaction data the whole thing could probably be duplicated in a couple days.
Technically, it doesn't seem very challenging at all. This is the perfect usage case for caching. The feeds aren't user specific, are they?
If not user specific: user requests feed for xyz.com: try to pull from cache. If there's a miss grab the feed from xyz.com, store to cache, and serve (be sure to set cache to expire in however often is necessary). If cache hit, you're done!
You can throw in extras, like make the cache semi fault tolerant by storing the latest feed to a DB. If your cache ever dies, then you can grab from DB to refill the cache.
Beyond that, it's just logging views and subscriptions to feeds.
Am I missing something? I don't actually use feedburner...
To log views, you have to change links to redirect to your service first and then redirect. But, that's not a huge technical hurdle. Other than that, I think you've pretty much summed up the basics. Oh, I guess the other thing they do, is convert direct links to the feed into something nice in the browser, and provide embeddable widgets and doodads. Again, nothing terribly hard about it.
Google as your competition with a product used by almost everyone is probably a little scary. And really a bunch of people have tried it and have yet to find a way to make money.
Upvoted but I do not like this idea of "do not go against Google". Zoho did not stop and they are a profitable company without outside funding. All their products compete with Google products. Twitter could have hung up when Google bought Jaiku. Omnisio does not allow new sign ups, and yet there are several people who can use the service. Gmail Chat is beautiful, but Meebo is still doing well. Friend Connect is out there, but Facebook Connect got 1.5M updates on Inauguration day. Android appstore has 800 apps, and the near future is not looking good. And so on...
EDIT:I say pick one field where Google sucks and improve it, make it better. One thing is for sure, you will have less competition by going against Google then by going against Twitter or FriendFeed or HN...
Yes; but, this is different. Your not competing with Google on something they think could make a ton of money. Its not something that Google is missing out on features. The problem is stability. Google has its own data centres and has many experts on this.
I agree. I would imagine this is an idea that is nearly impossible to turn a dime with.
What are your options really? Either charge a monthly fee for a service that your users can find for free elsewhere (either right now, or eventually) or you can slide in ads between the feeds you serve that no one is going to bother to click on anyway.
The big appeal of FeedBurner for most people is their subscriber count monitoring and, unfortunately for them, it's something they don't do a very good job of tracking to begin with.
The other big unspoken aspect of FeedBurner is that those very counts are so easy to manipulate that trusting anyone's numbers is too big of a leap of faith anyway. The whole system is about bunk now.
The problem is, unless you're using MyBrand, switching to another competitor means loosing all your existing subscribers.
Well, it doesn't if you leave the feedburner account alive. But it would be great if google somehow allowed us to redirect the feedburner account elsewehere via a 301 redirect. Ofcourse, that will never happen.
I think there is a market opportunity. Google has basically abandoned Feedburner. They have been doing a "migration" and my experience with that was terrible. It basically blew up and lost subscribers. And I'm not alone. If you look at the Feedburner "help group" http://groups.google.com/group/feedburner-statistics/topics?... you'll see a ton of people complaining about lost subscribers and there is not one response from anyone at Google.
I think a FeedBurner replacement could be a nice byproduct of another service. I'm thinking something like Bloglines+Technorati(was)+FeedBurner. Those are all just churning feeds in some way. Add analytics to it all, track trends (offer a service for business to pay), mine data and then you might have something.
My question is, why did Technorati.com not ever get into this market? It seems to me that they could provide more blogosphere tracking and hot spots if they knew which articles people were actually reading, not just linking to.
postrank/aiderss could offer this service in a snap. they already do the polling. and they also do more analytics than feedburner by looking at other services like digg/delicious/stumbleupon. however, this is not probably ilya's vision
1. Even though feeds are fairly small and easy to serve there’s got to come a point where you have so many users that even their small feeds begin to cost significant money. Feedburner not only has to check the host feed often but serve all the subscribers who poll as often as every 5 minutes. That’s a lot of bandwidth and a lot of server power.
2. With free analytics services all over the place it’s very unlikely you’ll be able to make money on a subscriber model which leaves ads as the only viable revenue stream. But for that to work you need a decent ad network behind you and you can’t very well use adsense
With that said, I'd think it a fairly easy service to duplicate. All Feedburner really does is read your feed and then repackage it while logging the pertinent data from the subscriber http transactions and sticking it in a database. Since every modern language I can think of has free libraries for reading RSS/Atom feeds and logging transaction data the whole thing could probably be duplicated in a couple days.