Written on June 12, 2008 – 4:24 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
My co-editor Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten is a serial Internet entrepreneur. You know the type, he constantly comes up with fresh ideas and builds new stuff all the time. His latest project might just become another hit, as it touches an important part of the human being: vanity. The thing is, his new service, called Twittercounter, allows you to show off the number of your Twitter followers. 
It’s just a matter of typing in your Twitter username and copy/ paste the code that shows up.
Apart from the bragging part, Twittercounter is also the new Feedburner. Boris explains why: “At the first Next Web conference, Michael Arrington said he didn’t pay attention to pageviews anymore. For him, it was all about RSS readers. Back then, RSS had just became popular. That was a real eye-opener. From that day on, I have been trying to increase the number of RSS readers on my blogs. But recently, I asked my (editors note: 1449) Twitter followers why some of them hadn’t subscribed to the Next Web Blog RSS feed. I got a lot of replies from people, most of them saying they were happy enough with the blog’s Twitter feed. That was another eye-opener for me”. So with those eye-openers in mind, Boris started working on a Twitter mash-up. The result can be seen here.
Although some people might find it too vain to put the number of Twitter followers on their blog, I expect that a larger number of bloggers can’t resist the nice-looking blue thingy.
I hope you like that post!
The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not just the Valley), exciting new technologies and inspiring entrepreneurs. If you're new here, you may want to read our '
About' page and subscribe to our
RSS feed.
Do you have a start-up that we should write about?
Contact us! Thanks for visiting and hope you come back again!
Written on June 1, 2008 – 12:32 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Feedburner has just announced that they will start offering AdSense to a small group of selected publishers. This will mean you will be able to show ads in your feeds directly. We already offer this to the publishers on The Next Web blog but we had to abuse the system a little bit. Right now we use the FeedFlare functionality to add links to our advertisers under each post feed. It was the most easy and manageable way to add a link to each feed without touching the Wordpress source files.
It would be nice to see more new features added to Feedburner in the future, something the Feedburner team is promising. One thing I would like to have is more control over the contents of the feeds through feedburner. It is great that Feedburner is adding Adsense but it would be even better if I could add AdSense, or some other content to my own feeds.
Some simple editing features would be great too. Images tend to get screwed up in feeds and it would be nice to be able to have a ‘Don’t show images’ option for feeds.
Another feature that I miss is the option to edit newsletters. Right now people can (and do) sign up for a FeedBurner newsletter from TheNextWeb.org. I can set a few options but have no control over any content. One thing I would love to do is have the newsletter sent out only once a week and then just email hyperlinked titles of posts instead of all posts.
After FeedBurner got acquired by Google they became very quiet with only a monthly update to the blog. For a while I wondered if Google was ‘Dogdeballing’ Feedburner and if it might be smart to go look for an alternative. It seems they are coming out of hiding now with some new features and updates. Just in time?
A few interesting Feedburner statistics:
Total feeds: 1,657,885
Number of publishers: 934,797
Number of podcast and videocast feeds: 229,542
Written on January 22, 2008 – 10:25 am
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Yesterday I read a post (can’t find it!) that explained how to get more subscribers to your RSS feeds. One tip was to show the amount of subscribers to your readers once that amount gets above 300. If you have more than 300 readers, they argued, that would show that you have a serious blog and that would make it more interesting to follow. In the previous two weeks we quickly grew to 3000+ subscribers so yesterday we included the Feedburner counter in the menubar here.
Unfortunately Feedburner is experiencing some trouble since Sunday. At first an error at FeedBlitz caused a spike in some Feedburner accounts of more than 200%. At ProBlogger the subscriber count leapt from around 39,000 to 41,000 and then to 100,000 subscribers. We haven’t seen such dramatic changes but Feedburner did stop updating all feeds altogether on Sunday.
A lot of blogs now depend on Feedburner to give some insight to the popularity of their blogs even more than visitor stats and page impressions so Feedburner not working is bad news. Unfortunately Feedburner hasn’t been giving any information about these problems. The last post on the Feedburner blog is from November 04, 2007. There is some discussion going on in the Feedburner forums about the inflated numbers though.
Feedblitz announced that their problems will most likely be fixed by Wednesday for most people and my guess is that Feedburner will start working again then too. Still, in this age of transparency it is strange that Feedburner hasn’t been communicating more. It seems that these problems started over the weekend so they have had plenty of time to report something.
UPDATE: a few minutes after I posted this story the Feedburner counter here updated for the first time in 48 hours. The Feedburner admin panel still shows old data. Seems like Feedburner is back up and updating incrementally.
UPDATE II: about an hour later the Feedburner site has been updated too. Everything seems to be back to normal. No official announcements yet.
Email
Facebook
Netlog
Linkedin
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
