I recently discovered that your Frienfeed subscribers’ counter has a direct impact on your Feedburner’s subcribers’ counter. As you can see below, I have linked a fresh new blog to my friendfeed account, and created a Feedburner URL for the blog’s feed. The results are pretty conclusive: The blog suddenly got a a surge of subscribers (compare to its 0 average), and the feedcount is almost equal to my number of subscribers on Friendfeed:
Why does this saddens me? The Feedburner subscribers’ count gives a fairly good clue on the influence one blog has. Knowing that you can pump up your RSS subscribers’ count by following a ton-load of people on Friendfeed for follow-backs makes it flaky. When I mentioned it to someone I collaborate with, his reaction was: “That’s stupid, it’s like counting Twitter followers as RSS subscribers!” I’m not sure if I agree or disagree actually. Is an official RSS reader subscribers more valuable than a Twitter subscribers? Quite frankly, I’d like to see numbers to be convinced. What do you think?