Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

Updates Across the Board

There is a lot of activity here, so we wanted to provide a quick update on a number of fronts.

SmartCast. Our "podcasting for everybody" service has been extremely popular and has begun to foster a number of add-on requests, most of which deal with bandwidth distribution. While a number of potential solutions have been publicly floated (and we've conceived a few of our own), we want to keep an eye on the evolution of enclosure usage a bit more carefully over the near term before we jump to any conclusions about how we approach additional services in this area. It appears that podcasts may be just the tip of the iceberg, so we'll see how usage evolves and go from there.

Feed Stats. We are currently working on another significant enhancement to feed statistics that will likely be released sometime just after the start of the new year. This release of feed stats will likely see the introduction of a premium level of service for that subset of publishers that want an even more detailed view of their statistics than currently provided. The existing free statistics service will also be significantly enhanced and will include better visual analysis of your circulation trends. Important: in case it's not clear from the above, all the stats that are currently free will be enhanced and remain free. Only some of the entirely new capabilities that carry with them an added cost to us will be grouped into the premium service.

Headline Animator. The neat little widget that continues to win the "Most Poorly Named FeedBurner Service" award for the fifth month running is being dramatically enhanced. This is one of the capabilities we are most excited about. The Headline Animator has become quite popular in recent weeks as people have begun to find very interesting uses for it despite its current fixed format, shape and style. The key here will be to keep the service simple as it becomes highly configurable, so that it retains its attraction as a quick and easy way to create awareness for a publisher.

Commerce in Feeds. We have a number of trials going on, and we're learning a lot. In the Amazon Associate Service, for example, we've learned a number of things, some of which we've already discussed here. We are trying to strike the right balance on the sponsored link gifs between providing a non-intrusive user experience on the one hand while clearly distinguishing the sponsored link from the publisher content so there is no confusion about which is which. On the web, this challenge has been successfully met by clearly marked text ads. In feeds, we currently use an image so that the feed isn't marked as "updated" when we refresh/rotate the Amazon link in the background (people would see that there were updated posts, look at the feed, and only see a new Amazon link. That's bad). So we use a FeedBurner image URL and transform the latest Amazon link text into a graphic that the image URL resolves to. There's a fine line to walk here between "hey, you're confusing things by making these links look like the post" and "hey, these are far too distracting". Finally, as always, it's important to mention here that all of our feed services are publisher selected and none of our services are mandatory. There's a lot more to say on this topic, but we'll do that as a separate post next week along with an updated discussion on feed splicing.