“You’re the Diet Coke of evil. Just one calorie, not evil enough.”

Social network and wonderfulness discovery engine Friendfeed set off a tizzy amongst its user base with yesterday’s announcement that they’ll start reporting Friendfeed profile subcsriptions as blog readers. To understand what that means, check out the image at the right hand side of this blog that trumpets “926 readers - by Feedburner“. Two days ago this blog was happy to boast 150ish subscribers, but Friendfeed’s update has visibly redefined the notion of blog reader measurement in a way that makes many bloggers - including me - uncomfortable.

I wasn’t sure what to make of the change at first, but now that cofounder Paul Buchheit has clarified his position it’s clear that Mr. Buchheit is wilfully conflating subscriptions to blogs with subscriptions to people:

I’m surprised that people think everyone subscribed to their RSS feed actually reads their blog. In Google Reader, I’m subscribed to hundreds of feeds (including a number of bundles), but really only read a couple of them. The same for iGoogle, etc. - Paul Buchheit

Why not count Friendfeed readers?

The 150 subscribers this blog claimed on Monday represented 150 different people opting in to a subscription to this blog. (If you haven’t tried it, you can do the same by clicking on either link next to the big orange button at the top right. It’ll even set you up with an email subscription if that’s what you’d prefer.) The 700+ new subscribers from Friendfeed have opted in to a subscription to Daniel Pritchett - not just this blog. This is a crucial distinction due to the variety of content user are sharing on networks like Friendfeed. Clicking through to Paul’s own feed shows that he’s streaming his contributions from almost 20 different services into a single feed. His personal blog is only one of those feeds, but its reader metrics will now include the 9000+ people following Paul’s FF profile.

Friendfeed founder kicks off a subscriber count blogmeme

While I dearly appreciate Paul’s contributions to my online life - I’m on GMail and Friendfeed at home, at work, and on the go - I’ve got to disagree with the spirit of his post. Paul’s right in suggesting that I’d be kidding myself if I thought more than a few people were actually reading every post I put up on this site whether the sidebar widget claims 900 or 150.

How do blog publishers know if anyone’s actually reading?

Blog syndication clearinghouse Feedburner provides lots of useful metrics behind the scenes to registered bloggers. Check out this Feedburner graph for a clear example of the difference between subscribers and active readers:

"Reach" measures actual readers rather than inactive subscribers

The green line counts everyone who’s signed up for a subscription to Sharing at Work while the blue line tracks the number of people actually reading the site’s news feed from day to day. On most days the green line is far above the blue one because most of you aren’t sitting around mashing F5 hoping for my next post to drop like Seth Godin’s legions of fans seem to do.

Why would Friendfeed HQ pretend that subscribing to a person and a publication are the same thing?

I think Paul, Bret, and the rest of the Friendfeed crew are savvy enough to see the difference between following a blog and following a blogger. My take on this change is that they, like many other of you - find subscriber counting to be an overblown pastime ripe for redesign. I figure Paul knows exactly what he’s doing by diluting Feedburner subscriber counts and he thinks that we’ll all be better off in a brave new future where people don’t write 800 word screeds like this one about blog subscriber counts and their effects on commerce, culture, and politics.

For even better analysis on this topic, check out buddy bloggers Rob Diana and Louis Gray’s posts from yesterday:

Nothing against the FriendFeed team, as they have always been awesome, but I think the subscriber count reporting may be a bad idea. I would prefer that they remove the feature (not that I have a choice) and continue adding awesomeness to FriendFeed itself.

fromSubscriber Counts Now Mean Nothing

Rob’sRegular Geek blog

It’s tempting to go back the age-old line of there being lies, damn lies, and statistics. On the Web, where practically everything is measured and big numbers are almost always better, counting up one’s followers, friends, subscribers or authority is practically a pasttime. But with each metric comes a question of validity - how did they approach that data, and is that process consistent with the world view of what is factual?

fromFriendFeed Sneaks Into My RSS Stats And Hits The Big Red Button

Louis at Louisgray.com Live

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