Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few months, you’ve certainly seen all the hullaballoo that took place when Google shut down Google Reader for good. Aside from being a damn good RSS web-based reader, it was very importantly, so popular that and backed by a company so huge that it basically killed off all its competitors without even trying. If you care about your blog, you’re probably looking for a FeedBurner replacement or a FeedBurner alternative just about now.
People have been panicking about the so-called “death of RSS” ever since. RSS has a special place in our hearts, we think the idea behind a simple, standardized, freely-accessible stream of updates for just any website is a confluence of awesomeness that only comes around once in a blue moon. In other words: if RSS dies today, it’s not because something equally awesome has replaced it. Anyone equating RSS with Twitter streams (where stuff is virtually designed to be lost in the madness) and Facebook “feeds” (accessible only to friends, at the mercy of Facebook Inc) has no clue what they are talking about.
The writing has been on the wall for months, and pretty much everyone has come to suspect the next shoe will soon drop and Google will kill FeedBurner (the equivalent of Google Reader for website publishers) in the next round of “spring cleaning.” Google purchased Chicago-based startup (yay Windy City!) FeedBurner from its founders back in 2007, and ever since has been disabling and dismembering it, one feature at a time. Today, FeedBurner is only a sorry reminder of it once was.
To that end, we are happy to introduce today FeedSnap.
FeedSnap’s goal is simple: to provide a reliable, capable, and actively maintained FeedBurner alternative for your beloved RSS feed. Take it from people that know what it’s like to serve a feed with 600,000 subscribers: it ain’t easy. Each of those clients is hitting your server every 5 or 10 minutes, demanding new content. Your viewers want to be able to preview the feed in their browser, only web browser in general have dropped support for RSS feeds as well. You want to keep track of who’s reading what and clicking through to where. FeedSnap is your answer.
Our goal isn’t to just stop with providing a worthy replacement to the once-awesome FeedBurner; the grand scheme is to revive much of what has been lost since the RSS heyday. We’ve talked before about the need for tagging standards (awesome /. discussion here) and there’s a lot of potential for structured data feeds for popular content around the web. Companies like Technorati tried but ultimately failed to bring order to the madness, the sheer quantity of web feeds made the task of sorting through the data all but impossible. Only time will tell what can be accomplished, but for now, if you need a safe place to trust your feed and your readers to, FeedSnap is the man for the job.
- Feeds are served by a global CDN, from nodes all over the world. No load on your servers, snappy feeds, and optimized delivery.
- Track subscribers and monitor trends in RSS delivery.
- Record views of feed entries.
- See clickthrough rates on all individual posts to monitor conversions back to your site or blog.
- Show off your reader count with our FeedCount widgets.
- Import your existing statistics from FeedBurner.
- Tell the world RSS isn’t dead yet!
Check out FeedSnap!
