See I knew I was smart to wait on this. Eric Lunt, the CTO of FeedBurner commented on my last entry on this and pointed me to this page from FeedBurner’s Burning Questions blog:
Since we launched the Feed Awareness API, many publishers have taken advantage of this capbility in order to allow third party applications to promote popular feeds, feeds whose subscriber numbers are growing, and other interesting analytical trends.
Now that the API has been available for a while, it’s worth clarifying a couple of items, both for ourselves and our publishers. First of all, if you enable the Awareness API for your feed, then the number of subscribers to your feed becomes a number that is accessible to third parties for inclusion in popular feed lists and other awareness and attention tracking directories. In the “Publicize” section of FeedBurner, you can toggle the Awareness capability on and off. Activating the awareness API makes your feed subscription numbers publicly available, as we put no restrictions on what services are allowed to leverage the API. It’s an open API.
Secondly, although feeds with the Awareness API enabled are making their subscriber data publicly available, going forward we will not comment on any individual feed metrics, whether or not those metrics are already available on other websites, unless the publisher has requested that we mention the numbers in some context. Recently, in a couple of interviews, we have discussed publicly available Feed Awareness metrics, and it is clear that in some cases, misunderstandings about the public nature of the API has led to publisher and subscriber concern about our comments vis a vis a particular feed’s popularity. The easy solution to this is to simply eliminate all public commentary about individual feed metrics, regardless of whether or not that data is already accessible.
We have always been very clear that we are here to serve publishers. We will make very clear on the “Publicize” page that activating the Awareness API makes your feed data available to third parties.
I fee a little better about this situation now. Leo Laporte has also posted an update on his side of the situation now as well over at the TWIT Web site. The fact that the people at FeedBurner would go out of their way to make this clear and known to me is proof enough that I should stay with them. So no more worries about changing feeds.
