Help Me, Feedburner, You’re My Only Hope
One of the first blog posts I wrote here was about how much I love Feedburner. Feedburner is so good at handling all the RSS feeds at my college, and I don’t have to worry about it.
One of Feedburner’s best features is it’s email subscriptions services. It handles user subscriptions, unsubscribe requests and lets you customize the look of the emails that get sent out. Basically, it’s the perfect RSS to Email platform. Set it and forget it. Each day, it dutifully sends out an email with my RSS headlines to on and off-campus users. It’s so great I want to use it send our intranet headlines to everyone on my campus. I’ve got the OK from administration and I want to get this project done.
So I started researching if Feedburner would let me import email addresses for my campus users. For a bit of time, Feedburner would allow you send a file to them and they would import email addresses for you. It’s a bit more work then just letting people do it themselves, but I can imagine that would lead to a spam avalanche for Feedburner. So, they stopped accepting email list imports.
During that time, they got acquired by Google. I’m sure they enjoyed a nice payday and the reliability of Google’s architecture, but the downside is that innovation and development on new features has pretty much dried up, similar to Google’s many other acquisitions (Grand Central, DodgeBall, Jaiku, etc.) The email list import is the biggest request by users on the support forums, and the answer seems to vary between “soon” to “sometime this month” to “never.”
I want to use Feedburner to send my emails. I’ve tried other services like Feedblitz and the emails lack the elegance of Feedburner. No offense, FeedBlitz, but setting up an account in your system was a hassle and the customization options were confusing. Feedburner is 10x more simple. Look at these emails and tell me which one looks more elegant and easier to read and understand.
Feedburner:
An email from Feedburner.
FeedBlitz:
An email from Feedblitz
Help me, Feedburner. Please, I beg you, let me import my users into your system. I will pay you for this functionality. I don’t have the time to spend trying to figure out how to make FeedBlitz look presentable. If anyone at Feedburner reads this, please email me.
Does anyone else out there have suggestions of services to check out, seeing as how FB will probably not get back to me? Thank you in advance.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
Comments
3 Responses to “Help Me, Feedburner, You’re My Only Hope”
Leave a Reply
How about a subscription campaign sent to your email list? Something smart and punchy to ask them to confirm their subscription with you. You send them to feedburner and they re-register.
Not perfect, but also a great way to clean up your emailing list and make if more efficient.
Just my 2 cents.
Grand Central… yeah I remember signing up for that months ago. Still has potential as a really cool service, but absolutely nothing has been done with the service by me or Google.
[...] - bookmarked by 5 members originally found by armarks on 2008-09-30 Help Me, Feedburner, You’re My Only Hope http://highedwebtech.com/2008/08/25/help-me-feedburner/ - bookmarked by 4 members originally found [...]