The Great Big List of Feed Readers and Aggregators

We are seeing a lot of comments on sites that use SmartFeed saying that SmartFeed also works with the blahblah feed reader, even though FeedBurner's SmartFeed doesn't explicitly proclaim support for the blahblah reader. Thus, we thought we would shed a bit of light on this for everybody.

We currently maintain a database of over 624 different RSS/Atom feed readers, aggregators, and other crawlers that have requested feeds published through FeedBurner in the last two months (including such notables as Soup 0.7.1, something called "Mmm....Brains...", and Shmozilla). When you "narrow" the list down to readers and aggregators that have only accessed multiple feeds or made more than a minimal number of requests, the list is still well over 300. We are still seeing many new readers and plan frequent additions to the list of supported user-agents we maintain in our FAQ. We use the "user-agent" because SmartFeed will behave differently depending on which version of some of the listed clients it detects!

We will shortly publish an extended list of all the agents for which we maintain behavior characteristics and for which SmartFeed behaves appropriately. We need to finish testing on the extended list before we want to definitively say we treat them all uniquely AND appropriately. This list that we publish (containing the readers/aggregators we treat uniquely) will always be a small subset of the total list of known readers, for two reasons:

a) some readers don't make enough feed requests to warrant investment in reacting to them uniquely, and

b) some readers shroud their identity in generic user-agents. The Bloomba client, just to pick on one in particular, presents itself as Java/1.4.1_05, as do a number of other clients, thus preventing us from treating them in a unique way ( even though the current version of Bloomba doesn't support Atom). Similarly, many readers send up a blank user-agent, thus not identifying themselves and preventing us from providing them with the most appropriate feed. Some of these blank user-agents are undoubtedly new products or search engines still in stealth mode that don't want to identify themselves. But our frequency of visitis by empty user-agents is simply too large to be just "new products under the radar".

We know what an absolutely thrilling topic this is for everybody, so stay tuned for the exciting conclusion of: "The Great Big List of Feed Readers and Aggregators".