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Steve and I are visiting with some of our partners this week in Asia, including Bokee in China, and our newly-announced partner GMO in Japan. We actually just arrived in Tokyo today after three days in Beijing. Our hosts at Bokee were fantastic, with many fabulous, interesting meals. We were also able to get a little site-seeing in.
Steve has a bunch more photos at Flickr.
I understand that geeknews doesn't like FeedBurner, and I can respect that. But I want to make sure that people's opinions of FeedBurner are informed by accurate information, so I just wanted to respond to a few of the comments on the post "Why would 100,000 people trust their RSS feed to FeedBurner".
"It is well known that an update on a site does not necessarily mean that feedburner is going to know about it immediately."
That's true unless you ping us. We will poll your feed every 30 minutes, so it's possible that your burned feed could be up to 30 minutes stale. To update your burned feed instantly, you have a number of options:
"...you have no idea if they go offline and they don't graph any outages"
We actually haven't had any downtime since June 25 when our colocation center got hit with a power outage. We pride ourselves on our availability, and we're always seeking to eliminate points of failure like this.
We will, however, notify you if there's ever an outage with your feed. Every publisher gets their own personal feed (called "FeedBulletin") where we will proactively notify publishers if their source feed is ever invalid or unreachable. You can visit your "My Account" page on FeedBurner for more information on this cool feature.
"...the statistics are never truly accurate."
Much like web stats, feed stats are an inexact science. We think we have the best understanding of all the different aggregators and their unique polling characteristics, but we're constantly learning and improving our algorithms.
One place we definitely want to improve is our podcast statistics. Currently, we don't track downloads to the enclosures themselves. That's something we're working on.
"I tired it and never got accurate Stats on podcasts listened to, not only that your statistics are public. I got nothing to hide but My stats are not everyone elses bussiness"
Point taken on the podcast stats (see above). But your stats are most definitely not public unless you as a publisher choose to make them public. By default, your stats are private. If you choose to enable the Awareness API, then your stats are made available to feed and podcasting directory services, which has been a boon to many podcasters.
"...but the question remains why would 100,000 people trust a third party to update and maintain the lifeblood of the one single document that connects most sites to their readership."
There are a number of ways that the publisher can keep complete control over their feed URL, so if we ever disappoint we can be cut out of the loop instantly. That just means we have to work hard to keep publishers very, very happy.
That's all for now. We're always open to suggestions for how we can improve our service. I'm going to put the cape away and return to fight FUD another day.
Another one of those cool emergent behaviors that sometimes happen in massively multiplayer games. This time, there's a blood infection that is spreading throughout the land in World of Warcraft.
If an infectous disease is this hard to control in a virtual world where the programmers are, literally, God, what chance do we really have if an avian flu pandemic takes hold in the non-virtual world?
Source: Virtual plague spreading like wildfire in World of Warcraft
I got this message at 11:30am today (Wednesday) trying to access a "space" on MSN spaces:
"The MSN Spaces network is being upgraded and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."
Yeah, I can just picture that exchange at MSN world headquarters:
If you're going to fake out a 500 error page, at least go with "The MSN Spaces server is getting a massage", which is the de facto standard 500 page for Web 2.0. "Upgraded" ... yeah right.