I’m not sure whose bright idea this was over at Friendfeed HQ but just for the record – it’s a fucking dumb one.
It is also one that may make me reconsider the use of the service anymore. I don’t care how you want to spin it on your corporate blog but this jacking up of my RSS feed stats is a load of crap.
Like Rob Diana I am all for ego stroking my stats – as long as I come by them legitimately but anyone who thinks that have a whack load of Friendfeed numbers tacked onto my RSS stats is valid is smoking bad drugs.
Let’s just take a look at the PR spin that get’s put on this nonsense before tearing it apart any further
We’re happy to announce that we’ve recently started sharing FriendFeed subscriber counts when we crawl for the latest version of your blog’s feed.
So if you have 200 people subscribed to you on FriendFeed, and you’ve added your blog as a service on FriendFeed, now you can see those subscribers right alongside the subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, and anyone else subscribed to your blog’s feed.
When you add your blog as a service on FriendFeed, you’re putting your words in front of a lot more people.
Wrong.
When it comes to Friendfeed the only thing I am putting in front of people is the headline of my post, and if I have MediaRSS installed on the blog maybe the first graphic. They are not getting the content of my posts as any of the other RSS services are.
At least with things like Google Reader I know the full content of my posts are getting in front of real eyeballs. What you are doing doesn’t even come close because there is no guarantee people will click through to read the posts from Friendfeed – none – zip.
Don’t think so then start checking referrer logs. I use Woopra so I get them real-time – and I know that just because someone might have liked, or commented, on a posted item on Friendfeed it doesn’t mean they even read the post. Hell most of the time they don’t. So tell me – how is this proving any value in my numbers?
Not only that but any number pimping isn’t even being done right. First let’s look at my overall Feedburner info for both Shooting at Bubbles and Braincell Soup both of which get feed into Friendfeed.
Now let’s look at the aggregation numbers for Shooting at Bubbles since this is the number that Friendfeed is touting as being so important
Funny I don’t see anything relating to Friendfeed here … well let’s see what Braincell Soup has to say
Wow! 1,145 subscribers from Friendfeed – that’s 5 less than my current number of actual subscribers on Friendfeed. Not bad eh – except for one thing. I haven’t hooked Braincell Soup up to Feedburner yet (that is an old URL setting), nor did I use the Feedburner URL to add Braincell Soup to Friendfeed – I used the native domain URL. By the way prior to this little exercise by Friendfeed the number of subscribers to a ‘dead’ Braincell Soup RSS feed was somewhere around 10.
So – someone please explain to me exactly what this new addition from Friendfeed is doing for me besides totally fucking with my real (are as near as they can be) numbers?
I don’t see how in any fashion this is benefiting me or any other blogger who is using Friendfeed. The idea that just because you are putting our post headlines in front of so many eyeballs makes those numbers valid is bullshit. My only hope is that unlike previous features that Friendfeed has implemented – some of which I still find questionable – we won’t find other’s duplicating this one as well.
I just hope Twitter, Facebook and other sites don’t choose to do the same thing, or we can call the whole tracking bit a wash.
This isn’t a shining moment Friendfeed – in fact it sucks the big one. Period.
