WebProNews

Tag: FeedBurner

  • Google May Have Dropped Another Twitter Feature

    The relationship between Google and Twitter has been somewhat rocky lately. Last year, the two companies were unable to reach an agreement that would continue to give Google access to the Twitter firehose to better its search results. For that reason, Google’s realtime search feature disappeared.

    When Google launched “Search Plus Your World,” integrating Google+ content more heavily into its search results, Twitter raised a big stink about how it was bad for the Internet, and noting that Google should be showing Twitter results for some queries where it was favoring Google+ results.

    Google’s response was:

    “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.”

    But Google does still show Twitter results, and it is in cases where Google has every right to show them, but doesn’t, that Twitter appears to have the biggest problem.

    The tensions even led to the cancellation of a meeting between the two companies that may have otherwise resulted in a better Twitter experience on Android devices.

    But that’s all old news at this point. There was an interesting post in WebmasterWorld about another subtle disconnect between Google and Twitter, which could be related to the deterioration of the relationship between the two companies, or could just be a coincidence. It’s interesting nonetheless.

    WebmasterWorld member Sgt Kickaxe posted in the forum:

    Im not sure if anyone’s noticed or written about this yet but the Twitter option in feedburner [webmasterworld.com] has gone awol. In fact the entire “socialize” option link now appears missing.

    The service is still active (for now), you can manually navigate to the socialize page by typing the address in your navigation bar. old address: feedburner.google.com/fb/a/socialize?id=YOURIDHERE

    What I liked about the service was that it automatically used Google’s shortening service for links which comes with analytics. At this point the service is still active though unreachable if you don’t know the address so it may be taken offline, eventually, or perhaps it will just stop accepting NEW connections but will not change existing connections, or?

    Perhaps Google simply decided to stop promoting twitter altogether after their fallout over tweet indexing. Who knows.

    My guess is that this is not directly related to the company politics between Google and Twitter. If that were the case, I’d expect other Twitter features to be missing from Google products as well – like the share on Twitter option from Google Reader or YouTube. Removal of things like this would hurt the user experience.

  • FeedBurner Re-Design Could Use More Features

    The FeedBurner re-design has been in beta testing for a few months now, but does it make the service better?

    I’m a big fan of FeedBurner and I really like the new look and feel as it’s much cleaner and matches other Google products, however since it’s so familiar, it feels a little lacking.

    At this time there is no way to select a date range other than the pre-defined time periods that are offered, there is no way to export data, and there is no way to tie data points together; such as referring URLs to posts.

    What I’d really like to see is FeedBurner integrate this information into Google Analytics. The two services are very similar in what they do, and how they look, that it feels like they should live together. Hopefully then FeedBurner could utilize some of the great features in Google Analytics to make this data more robust.

    New FeedBurner

    Other than the new design, the only other new item is the fact that it does real-time analytics. This lets you use what impact your new post has on the web moments after you publish it.

    Now if you really have time to sit down and watch your analytics in real-time, good for you. But I doubt many will see this as a usable feature.

    Instead, I’d like to see FeedBurner give users more customization and social interaction.

    Integration into Twitter is great, but what about Facebook? Are there other destinations that could benefit from updates? What about seeing status updates that include our FeedBurner URL so we can really see how it’s being syndicated?

    What about some additional feed customization? The basic ‘clean’ template is ancient in terms of internet age and it’d be nice to see even basic customization like Twitter offers.

    How about the ability to share a FeedBurner account with multiple Google accounts? Much like Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, sometimes more than one person wants to analyze the data.

    How about some nice charts and data points like Feed Analysis offers? These charts are well received by those that don’t get the data.

    It just seems to me that FeedBurner has just maintained its presence since it was acquired by Google in 2007. Little changes have been happening over the years, but it still feels like it’s not living up to its potential.

    Maybe it’s the lack of competition, or maybe the FeedBurner teams feels it doesn’t need to be any more than it already is, however I’d like to see FeedBurner step up its game and become much more valuable to marketers and site owners.

    Originally published at bloggerdesign.