Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

New Year's Revolution

It's that time of year again, when we look forward to a new year full of possibilities and think to ourselves "this is a new year full of possibilities." We have a lot planned for FeedBurner, and we thought it would be fun to kick things off with a short preview of how the first three months of the year will shake out around here.

Feed Insurance
We have been working on a detailed scalability, availability, and performance plan for 2006 to keep pace with global feed and publisher growth. And we are investing a significant amount of effort in order to achieve our goals. One of the capabilities we are very excited to roll out in Q1 will be something we are calling Feed Insurance. We have been laying the groundwork for geo-redundancy (multiple hosting facilities that can pick up the slack if one facility goes down). Hat tip to Kevin Burton for an idea he presented to us as a very nifty spin on feed availability. Kevin's suggestion was to have a separate facility that just redirects feed requests to the publisher's source feed if anything catastrophic happens to FeedBurner's hosting network. FeedBurner down? You still get a feed. Source feed down? You still get a feed. Think of it as a simple initial approach to feed redundancy. We have taken this idea and are expanding it in several ways in order to make things as seamless as possible. We are setting this up so that it will be invisible to publishers - you don't need to do anything irrespective of any of the myriad ways in which you may be pointing your feed to FeedBurner.

Something for Everyone
Over the next three months, we plan to roll out new services and features that will appeal to every type of FeedBurner customer - from individual bloggers to rich mediacasters (podcast and videocasters) as well as commercial publishers. And, as promised, we'll launch phases 2 and 3 of our FeedFlare service, in which publishers can use FeedFlare on their websites and we'll have a completely open API for FeedFlare to third parties and customers. We already have a number of third party services helping us flesh out the API and there are some very cool capabilities that are being created here. Overall, you can look forward to a broad set of enhancements to both our statistics and monetization capabilities. The statistics enhancements will introduce some new concepts and provide a more integrated dashboard for drilling down into stats. We'd like to say more, but we're under an engineering team gag order, in which public comments about scope and delivery dates are met with armed resistance.

Then What?
We have another Feed for Thought piece coming that will touch on market metrics, monetization, and some other word that will start with the letter 'M'. And we've adopted the new standard feed icon that both Mozilla and Microsoft have endorsed (you can find this under the "Publicize" tab within the Chicklet Chooser feature). Beyond that, we try not to get too far ahead of ourselves.

Happy new year from your friends at FeedBurner.