19
Feb

Feedburner - another rush to publish a story?

Posted by Steven Hodson in Tuesday, February 19th 2008      

Feedburner turning the data taps back on Yesterday one of the main stories being passed around was the one broken by my blogging buddy Louis Gray about Feedburner apparently nixing the availability of your feed’s long term data. It was quickly picked up by sites like Mashable and Weblog Tools Collection and the story also made the rounds of various link blogs.

Unfortunately it may turn out that the real cause of the missing stats wasn’t Google (the owner of Feedburner) nixing the feature but more of a bug that showed up in the FeedBurner code. According to Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo in an email to Michael Arrington at TechCrunch this was indeed the case:

By the way, there’s been a bit of a stir caused by reports yesterday that Feedburner turned off historical stats. CEO Dick Costolo said via email that it was just a bug caused by a code update, and it will be fixed shortly.

Now whether this was just some quick spin management by Feedburner when they saw that the reaction to the feature being removed didn’t bode well so it is being returned; or in fact it was a bug we won’t really know.

I will admit I was pretty close a couple of times yesterday to making some comments about the whole thing which consider I am not the biggest fan of all things Google would have been the natural thing to do. Except for some reason something about the missing feature and the reason for the vanishing act just didn’t gel for me - so I decided to take a wait and see position.

Now Louis to his benefit and quick eye may have saved Feedburner users from having a fairly major data resource removed but it in reality may have been nothing more than a non-story if what the Feedburner folks say is the facts. I will give Feedburner credit though in that they were quick to respond though both by commenting on Louis’ post about the incident and also making sure the wider audience knew the problem was being dealt with by going through TechCrunch.

It will be interesting to see if the correction to the story is picked up by anyone who wrote about it in the first place. Of them all my vote would be for Louis to have something posted about it - the rest well we’ll see.

Conversation Tags: ,



under: The Social Web    

Related Post

Viewing 2 Comments

    • ^
    • v
    I wouldn't call this a correction to the story. The facts are that on one day, the data wasn't there. Supporting elements to the story were that the users were complaining in the forum for a few days about the missing feature and being ignored. Also, the FeedBurner blog was completely silent. I sent an e-mail to one @feedburber.com e-mail I had, but never got a response. So my post was absolutely true, and not in a rush to publish, per se. Whether it was a bug that got fixed, or a PR issue that got resolved doesn't really matter, as FeedBurner did the right thing by resolving it, posting publicly on my blog, and writing back to TechCrunch, who would have made the story a lot bigger had it gone unanswered. I don't think I jumped the gun at all, just raised the issue publicly. Others... as they tend to do... followed on and spun it in their own way. I even had the graphic I used from my own site, with my own stats, "Borrowed" from one of the site's following.
    • ^
    • v
    I figured you would have attempted for clarification on the matter from Feedburner themselves and you did leave your post with an open question which gave them an avenue to answer to the problem.

    And given the data you had I can see why you went ahead with the story. If anything it showed Feedburner that not dealing with a problem - assuming that this was a bug related issue - isn't necessarily a good way of dealing with all. It only causes folks like you and I to write about it and raise questions concerning the whole affair.

    But I was right though - you were the first to respond with a correc .... errr ... followup post :)

Trackbacks

close Reblog this comment
Powered by Disqus · Learn more
blog comments powered by Disqus
« No Queensbury Rules Here
Cross Knowledge - the added value of a blog »