Feedburner Google migration is an unmitigated disaster
UPDATE: if you respond to the email that says your feeds moved over successfully, Google does actually get back to you several days later with an email that indicates they’re reading the emails and getting to them as they can, but are overwhelmed at the moment. This might be the best way to make sure your problems are known to them. But do please search the forums to see if your problems are already known, or have easy solutions you can implement yourself! The less time we waste asking them questions that have been answered publicly, the sooner they’ll get everything handled.
Not since Coke decided to change their flavor in the ’80s has a major company done something so fundamentally backwards as Google’s forced migration of feeds from Feedburner to, um, a slightly different subdomain. The bugs in the forums are numerous. While some of the questions there are repetitive ones from newbies who didn’t bother searching the forum to discover the problem is known (but not yet fixed), most are about glitches that need to be taken care of. There are over 6,000 messages. It’s just ridiculous.
I haven’t migrated this blog yet. I have several different FB accounts, and am not sure I’m going to migrate this last batch. The first account migrated over pretty easily, with the exception of some hiccups in MyBrand, which I managed to fix by Googling for solutions. The second batch, however, simply didn’t migrate. I got the email saying they had, but they’re not in my account. With one exception, they are in fact working – that’s a big relief, since I have several hundred subscribers I’d rather not lose. But I can’t see them in my account, can’t access them, and can’t make changes to them.
Does Google care? Oh, hell, no. They don’t owe us this free service, do they? We’re fortunate they condescend to deal with us scumbag webmasters, right? At least that’s how Google always makes me feel. They wouldn’t have a web to sell advertising on if it weren’t for us, but I get the feeling they wish we’d dry up and blow away all the same.
I will probably end up redirecting the MyBrand feeds on this blog and several of my others back to the usual old WordPress feeds – for now at least. Maybe if, at some point, Google fixed FB, I’ll reconsider. But at the moment, neither this blog nor several of my others are poised to attract advertisers or buyers on the basis of my lowly feed numbers, so it’s not as if having that metric would be a help to me.
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