Statistics

Three days ago, we sent out an email to 20 people about our pre-alpha launch, hoping to have a small group of people using the service and bang around on it for a while to test drive it, and what do you know, we already have far more publishers using and testing the service than we thought we'd have after a month! That's great (although it makes for a frantic initial weekend).

I wanted to point out that the statistics page for your feed should be considered a feature that is still very much "in progress". It is functional and working, however, we have been discussing what counts as a "subscriber". Is it generally any requests that aren't "if-modified-since" requests? Not really, because there are some newsreaders out there that don't behave properly and don't send if-modified-since. Is it a unique IP address? not necessarily, because you might have an aggregator like my.yahoo make multiple requests for the feed from different IP addresses for a single user. Conversely, and more likely, you could have an aggregator making requests on behalf of hundreds of "subscribers" from only one or two IP addresses. Anyway, this conversation gets boring real quick-like, however, we have come up with some interesting ideas as to how to get our publishers a more and more accurate picture of how their feed is being used.

For example, we can use some of the interesting and very helpful new information that a couple of the web aggregators are reporting in their http-requests....essentially providing us with the ability to say, for example, that even though my.yahoo is making one request for the feed, it is on behalf of 42 users. This is very helpful data from the web aggregators and hopefully they will all start to provide this data in their requests.

As always, if you have any suggestions or requests, pass them along as either comments here or via email to feedback AT feedburner DOT com.