Friendfeed now reports subscriber counts to feedburner, so you have a more accurate view of your total subscriber counts all in one place. This is particularly good news for a data nerd like me, since the Friendfeed API doesn’t even let you find out your ff subscriber count.
There is a down side, however, as Kevin notes at bloggingtips.
In my opinion this is an incredibly bad move from FeedBurner. It is incredibly easy to get people to subscribe to an RSS feed through FriendFeed. Just like Twitter, many people follow anyone who follows them. This means that the feedburner count can be very easily manipulated to show a higher count than it actually has.
There’s absolutely some truth to that, and comments in freindfeed’s blog post go further.
I push out a full feed, so those subscribers are getting the content. They are the equivalent of site visitors. Friendfeed merely publishes the headline so that is a very different kind of subscription.
Absolutely true. I’m in the same boat, my feed has the entire article, but friendfeed shows only headlines.
On a similar topic, I was excited not long ago about the idea of automatically subscribing to my twitter followers blogs in friendfeed. It was a dead simple way to subscribe to all their blogs and get some awesome content – but it turned out that headlines-only-feeds pretty much suck. Awesome opportunity gone. Anyone else have any good soultions for massively subscribing to a twitter followers’ blogs?