SubscribeOutlook 2007/IE7 and FeedBurner Subscriber statistics
As most of you probably know, Outlook 2007 and IE7 have built-in RSS support. In fact, they use the same RSS engine. If you want to know more about Outlook’s RSS support, then check out the blog of the Outlook program manager for this feature.
If you provide an RSS feed for your blog, then there is a good chance that you use FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a great tool to get accurate statistics on how many subscribers an RSS feed has for example. Unfortunately, FeedBurner doesn’t count any subscriptions from Outlook 2007 or IE7. It looks like FeedBurner just doesn’t know that Outlook 2007/IE7 can be real RSS readers. This is a pretty annoying problem for me, as I would assume that a large number of you are subscribing to my blog via Outlook 2007.
With over 3.5 million downloads of Office 2007 and I don’t know how many of IE7 RC1 and Vista, this is not just a minor issue. Hence, if you use FeedBurner, your subscription number might be too low as well. Let’s hope that they recognize this problem and fix it soon.
October 3rd, 2006 at 18:43
Hi Patrick -
I answered over in the forums, but just in case: we certainly should be tracking OL2007/IE7 subscriptions differently than browser hits from IE7. In looking at your reports, I see both IE7 listed as a browser (i.e., someone looking at your feed by navigating to the feed in the browser) as well as the Windows RSS platform (the RSS subscription engine polling your feed). What’s at issue is your belief that you have more feed subscribers than we’re seeing. Let’s flesh this out in the forums and we’ll get to the bottom of what we are (or aren’t) seeing, and get you satisfied with the results.
Thanks for raising the issue, keep an eye on the forums post.
Regards,
Rick
VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
October 3rd, 2006 at 18:49
Thanks a lot Rick! I replied in the forums.
October 4th, 2006 at 0:13
[…] Thanks to the great help by Rick Klau, VP, Publisher Services, FeedBurner, the problem I raised earlier today in a blog post has been identified. […]
October 10th, 2006 at 18:53
[…] RSS & the user-agent string One of our dedicated MVP’s, Patrick Schmid, reported in his post here that: If you provide an RSS feed for your blog, then there is a good chance that you use FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a great tool to get accurate statistics on how many subscribers an RSS feed has for example. Unfortunately, FeedBurner doesn’t count any subscriptions from Outlook 2007 or IE7. It looks like FeedBurner just doesn’t know that Outlook 2007/IE7 can be real RSS readers. This is a pretty annoying problem for me, as I would assume that a large number of you are subscribing to my blog via Outlook 2007. For Outlook 2007 we will unfortunately not be able to report any custom user agent string for our RSS aggregation. Due to the way we integrate with IE across many parts of the application (the WININET stack is the underlying infrastructure for all of Outlook’s internet communication), we cannot easily and safely change the way we broadcast ourselves when connecting to external servers. To do so would require a fundamental change in the way the WININET stack is called from Outlook and could affect all of the Office applications. The scope of this fix is unfortunately outside of what we can provide this release. We are going to work with Patrick, IE, and the Feedburner folks to see if there is anything else we can do. Published 10 October 06 03:46 by michaelaffronti Filed under: RSS Aggregation […]