1. "they are a great example of providing an awesome free service to consumer-level users (bloggers) as a way to gain visibility and a foothold on the enterprise market."

Exactly! If you want to be successful in the enterprise market, you need to release a consumer facing app first - it's the best way to get your name out.

Posted at 3:37PM on May 16th 2006 by Pete Cashmore

2. Feedburner has done nothing but amazine me. There is no company better positioned in the RSS industry.

However, I do wish they worked on their interface. The user experience for RSS subscribers as well as publishers is sub par.

Posted at 4:59PM on May 16th 2006 by Ari Mir

3. Pete, I'm interested to see that you agree with me on this. I wonder though if we're biased because we both focus on customer-facing apps. I wonder if Feedburner, Newsgator, or Google Enterprise perhaps would tell the story the same way.

Ari - I am surprised to read your comment. You must have higher standards for UI than I do! FB does have some problem making a large number of features clearly managable, I've talked to several people who don't know where to find their number of email subscribers for example and loads of people haven't noticed that they need to replace their blog's native RSS header tags w/ their Feedburner URL for autodiscovery - despite those instructions being onsite. Hmmm....maybe I see your point after all! I also think their recent asthetic redesign is for the worse - but none the less, wow what a company.

Posted at 5:28PM on May 16th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

4. Hey, this is John Zeratsky from FeedBurner.

Ari and Marshall, what can we do better? We take design very seriously and as such it's totally integrated in our product development process. If you've got pointed feedback, let us have it!

To your specific points, yeah Marshall, the autodiscovery thing is still cloudy for a lot of publishers. We have plans to improve that process. Email subscribers are on the analyze tab for your feed, with the rest of your stats.

Posted at 5:51PM on May 16th 2006 by John Zeratsky

5. John, thanks for stopping by. I know where to find email subscriber numbers but it's not that intuitive for most users to scroll down below a list of increasingly obscure RSS readers until they get to another list that's important to them again at the bottom of the page.

Also, the publicize/optimize/etc. tabs still confuse me in terms of remembering what functions are behind which tab and I use my FB dashboard at least twice a week.

Finally, while you're at it :) it sure would be nice to have "monitor by IM/SMS" available in addition to subbing in a feed reader. Like zaptxt.com or rasasa does. SMS me if I'm not avail in IM. Maybe you should acquire one of those services or immedi.at?

FeedBurner is great though, it's a must-have service.

Posted at 8:57PM on May 17th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

6. Marshall, thanks for the excellent tips. I agree with all of those things :-) and we're actually working on addressing several of them.

Posted at 9:57AM on May 18th 2006 by John Zeratsky