Pre-Alpha Update

We have been in Pre-Alpha mode since we announced FeedBurner several months ago. I had been meaning to post a few thoughts regarding the Pre-Alpha and our migration out of Pre-Alpha over the past few days, but have been otherwise occupied. I'd like to now take a moment and talk about our transition from Pre-Alpha to Beta.

We launched FeedBurner four months ago in Pre-Alpha mode for a number of reasons. First, we knew on launch that we would discover a number of bugs only once we began caching a large number of "real-world" feeds; feeds with invalid tags, feeds with improper character encoding, feeds that were updated strangely, etc. There are only so many demons (aka bugs) you can test out of software in the lab. For the sort of public open-use service we offer, you have to get the software out there and let people run it through its paces. We have been delighted with the software's performance, and we have indeed exorcised a significant number of those anticipated bugs over the last several months. We are now very pleased with the system's ability to handle all sorts of strange boundary conditions.

The second reason we launched Pre-Alpha is that we were not satisfied with the redundancy of our upstream bandwidth. We have very recently secured institutional funding for FeedBurner, and we will now be working quickly to get FeedBurner onto the sort of high availablilty configuration that makes us more comfortable. The team here has provided hosted software to global financial institutions, mobile operators, and other high availability offerings in the past, so we know HA when we see it, and we've known we aren't there yet. Apologies for changing verb tenses mid-sentence there. Some people can write, others become software executives.

Over the next month, we will be transitioning to Beta. This transition will include both the migration of the environment to more highly available configurations and the introduction of a variety of new services that we believe will really begin to highlight some of the interesting capabilities of our software.

It is going to be an extraordinarily busy and exciting summer for us. We will continue to post here regularly, whether outlining the logic behind some new service or discussing the broader issues and potential for the syndication market. We pride ourselves on our customer service, and we subscribe to the notion that transparency to process such as this builds trust over time. We remain convinced that FeedBurner will become even more popular and compelling over the coming months, particularly as we expand our capabilities, bolster our infrastructure, and begin to work with some fantastic partners.