August 27, 2005
Awareness API and Subscriber Numbers
Since we launched the Feed Awareness API, many publishers have taken advantage of this capbility in order to allow third party applications to promote popular feeds, feeds whose subscriber numbers are growing, and other interesting analytical trends.
Now that the API has been available for a while, it's worth clarifying a couple of items, both for ourselves and our publishers. First of all, if you enable the Awareness API for your feed, then the number of subscribers to your feed becomes a number that is accessible to third parties for inclusion in popular feed lists and other awareness and attention tracking directories. In the "Publicize" section of FeedBurner, you can toggle the Awareness capability on and off. Activating the awareness API makes your feed subscription numbers publicly available, as we put no restrictions on what services are allowed to leverage the API. It's an open API.
Secondly, although feeds with the Awareness API enabled are making their subscriber data publicly available, going forward we will not comment on any individual feed metrics, whether or not those metrics are already available on other websites, unless the publisher has requested that we mention the numbers in some context. Recently, in a couple of interviews, we have discussed publicly available Feed Awareness metrics, and it is clear that in some cases, misunderstandings about the public nature of the API has led to publisher and subscriber concern about our comments vis a vis a particular feed's popularity. The easy solution to this is to simply eliminate all public commentary about individual feed metrics, regardless of whether or not that data is already accessible.
We have always been very clear that we are here to serve publishers. We will make very clear on the "Publicize" page that activating the Awareness API makes your feed data available to third parties.
UPDATE: Kevin from HDBeat notes we should emphasize that the Awareness API is not activated by default. You must enable it and/or the FeedCount graphic in the "Publicize" section of FeedBurner. Good point, thanks Kevin.
Comments
After reading the recent story regarding TWiT's subscriber numbers, I appreciate you clarifying the situation. Most importantly, I'm glad to see that the Awareness API is NOT activated by default; something important that you neglected to specifically mention. You touch upon it in the "if you enable" comment, but I think it's worth emphasizing.
Thanks,
kct
It's sad that some bloggers feel the need to pile on by unfairly and rather harshly criticizing FeedBurner at every turn. I believe most of those that covered Leo's complaint on their blogs only did it to have something, anything, to write about. It should be obvious when you enable something on a feature headed, "Publicize" you're giving up some rights to privacy. I accept Leo's apology and believe he really didn't recall he enabled this feature. But everyone else that piled on and added to the frenzy of complaints should take the time to make an apology to FeedBurner too.
Its quite apparent that FeedBurner does care about its publishers, will quickly and publicly (with transparency) respond to any issue that comes up, no matter how trivial and unfair the complaints maybe.
I would like to thank FeedBurner and its management team for always taking the time to respond to the blogosphere's concerns [no matter how trivial they are] and for always trying to do the right thing.
I read all the comments and all the posts from Leo
and I say "So What?" Oh no you got my IP address heck when I got Comcast in Feb I was told and read that the ip may change ITS NOT static I didnt pay for that neither does most users So big whoopie.
Im a beginner that wants to do podcasting and feedburner is perfect for me. TWIT was going to be big enough so that when it got huge maybe it outgrew feedburner months ago. They have the recorses to host their own feeds go for it.
But for the majority, that has a podcast they may never see the Top 10,20 or 40 I listen to a lot of them that some of the podcasters even say they do it for fun if 1 or 10,000 listen great and feedburner makes it so, like me, dotn have t shell out extra money on hosting to get access to the features needed
Im staying with feedburner when my podcast comes out I know I wont retire from work or make any money on it Im doin it for fun and kno also Ill never be big enough to need to do my own RSS etc.
Le mention, KBCafe profiles uses Awareness API now. Any blogs that publish their sub numbers thru FeedBurner get points equal to the square root of their subs.
http://www.kbcafe.com/profiles.aspx
