Recent Enhancements and "The Long View"

We have an exciting new service for publishers and some enhancements for a couple of our most popular services. I'd also like to tie these new features to "the long view" of how we see the world of syndication evolving, and the role that FeedBurner will play in this fast-growing space.

Introducing FeedCount™
The new service that is now open to all publishers is FeedCount. This is a customizable chicklet that shows the current number of subscribers your feed reaches. It's suitable for display on your home page or wherever you'd like to show your current circulation. To generate a FeedCount for your FeedBurner feed, just go to the Publicize... link next to your feed on the "My Feeds" page and customize your FeedCount chicklet. When you are done, copy the HTML snippet FeedBurner generates and paste it into your own page templates.

Here's an example of what a static FeedCount looks like for the Burning Questions blog:

And here's an animated version:

The long view: FeedBurner will greatly expand the offerings for publisher awareness and innovative content syndication. The popularity of the Headline Animator, feed rolls, and aggregated feeds suggests a real desire for publishers to be able to distribute their content beyond the bounds of their own site. We hear you loud and clear. Look for additional publisher awareness tools from FeedBurner in the near future.

SmartCast™ Improvements
Our SmartCast service has helped literally hundreds of publishers create podcast-enabled feeds from tools that don't natively support RSS 2.0 enclosures. In fact, on most days, 1 in 5 of the podcasts listed on audio.weblogs.com are powered by FeedBurner with SmartCast.

Our latest improvement to SmartCast makes it even easier to create a podcast. See this post for the how-to; the upshot is that you can now use just about any publishing tool (including the newly launched MSN Spaces) to create podcasts. Just link to the audio file, run your feed through SmartCast, and out pops an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures!

The long view: FeedBurner will continue to work towards making any publishing tool compatible with any feed client. It started with SmartFeed™ and continues with SmartCast: you, as a publisher, shouldn't have to care about the particulars of one feed format vs. another. Heck, subscribers shouldn't care either! Because FeedBurner sits between the publishing tool and the client, we can ensure that the feed is aligned with the capabilities of the reader. The rise of podcast-specific clients is just the first example. We think rich media has a big future with feeds, and you'll start to see namespaces, publishing tools, and specialized clients pop up all over the place. As a smart man once said: "Podcasts: fad. Enclosures: trend." From photos to video files to calendar information, look for richer feeds to become more prevalent sooner rather than later.

Flickr Splicing
One more often-requested feature we recently implemented is to allow users to splice in a subset of their photos into their feed using the power of Flickr tags. The Flickr Splicer service now allows the publisher to specify one or more tags, and only those photos that have that tag will be spliced into your feed. This is a great way to tune your feed for maximum relevance.

The long view: for some, the feed is becoming a first-class citizen in the world of content, and FeedBurner wants to help. Feeds pretty much started out being a lightweight content transport, or a notification mechanism. This remains a completely valid and appropriate use of feeds: as an extension of your web site that draws users to visit your web-based content. But as publishing tools begin to specialize ("I keep my photos on Flickr, my blog's with Blogger, I use del.icio.us to store my links, and then I've got my calendar, NetFlix queue, Amazon wish list, and so on and so forth"), it starts to get harder and harder to point to a single URL and say "This is me." The one thing that all of these content sources have in common, however, is the ability to provide a standardized representation of themselves as a feed. A FeedBurner goal is to help you collect and manage the "scattered pieces of you" into a single resource that can easily be shared with others. The feed starts to become much greater than the sum of its parts.

We also realize that there are a lot more content sources out there that could be spliced in; we've received requests from publishers to splice in content from Audioscrobbler, deviantART, Dude, Check This Out!, All Consuming, and many other sources, not to mention generalized splicing. The only reason we haven't implemented any and all of these services is simply a shortage of resources and time on our part. Which is silly – why should we be a gating factor to adding innovative services? Wouldn't it be great if there was an open, public "plug-in" mechanism for configuring additional content sources that could be spliced into a feed? We're working on it, and we want to do it in such a way that the efforts of one power-user can be leveraged by all.

If you have any questions, comments, or requests for FeedBurner, please jump over to our Forums and join the discussion.

Oh, and Happy Holidays from FeedBurner!