“And with a snap of their magic finger, Google removes FriendFeed from Feedburner stats”

UPDATED! Scroll down for more news!

Yesterday Feedburner counted close to 30000 Subscribers to our RSS feed. That number included all our FriendFeed subscribers.

Today, those subscribers seems to have been excluded and Feedburner counts a little more than 11000 RSS subscribers.

There are two possibilities that could have caused this.

1: There is a bug in Feedburner or Friendfeed
2: Feedburner has stopped counting Friendfeed subscribers

Although we are hoping that this is a simple bug (there have been problems before) we are going to be all paranoid about it and assume the worst.

You see, that second option has something going for it too. Doing a search at Twitter for “Friendfeed+Feedburner” right now shows that a lot of people assume that Google simply pulled the plug from Friendfeed.

Yes, in case you missed that one, Google owns Feedburner. But why would they pull the plug?

Well, there has been a fair amount of animosity between Facebook and Google in the past as illustrated in this detailed and entertaining Wired Magazine story. Could it be that now that Facebook has acquired Friendfeed that Google has decided to severe all ties with it?

I think it would be a huge faux pas on Google’s part if they did that and wouldn’t rhyme well with their ‘Don’t do evil’ mantra. But stranger things have happened so we will ask around and report back to you when we have more details.

Until then, we are going to assume it is just a temporary hiccup over at Feedburner.

Oh, the title of this post was taken from a tweet by @ TheMarketingGuy who complained about this issue earlier.

UPDATED: Feedburner has posted a message on their blog explaining that there is indeed an error at Friendfeed. They ARE talking to Friendfeed about it. The message in full:

Issue: We are working with FriendFeed to determine why subscriber totals from this service are not available in the most recent daily subscriber counts reported for FeedBurner feeds. We will update this post with any status changes and resolution.

You see? Nothing is wrong there is just something wrong. Or, as one of our comments said: it is just “normal buggy behavior”.