Google Feeds Gone Wild?

Posted on March 10, 2009 
Filed Under Customer Service, Email Marketing, Rant

I’ve probably mentioned several times how much I love Aweber. Nothing has changed, but this last week I was shocked to see my blog broadcast, that is released to my subscribers every Tuesday through Aweber, was…well a little off. One of my good friends, and subscribers, forwarded the broadcast to me asking, “What the heck?”

Well it didn’t take me long to see exactly what she was referring to. Seems instead of sending only the last week’s new posts, it included a slew of older posts from December…ten of them to be exact. I’m sure my other subscribers were just as confused and wondered why on earth I would send these old posts from last year.

Racking my brain, I couldn’t figure out why this would happen all of a sudden. I hadn’t changed any of those blog posts, I hadn’t changed my blog broadcast in Aweber, so what happened?

I immediately put in a support ticket to Aweber to see if they could help figure this problem it out. After investigating my problem, their reply alluded that it looked as though my RSS feed had changed. Well it only took me a few seconds to realize they may actually be right. Just the week before I had logged into my FeedBurner account, only to be met with the following message:

feedburner

Now, this was a little weird. First of all I have never received any communication via email or otherwise that Google had acquired FeedBurner. Second, there was absolutely no information on this page, just an ultimatum basically, to move my feeds to a Google account.

This is not exactly the right way to go about doing things, Google. I mean I’m a pretty big fan of Google, and use many of their applications, but the least they could have done is give someone a head’s up on what is going on and about to happen, especially on something that is this sensitive to my business and can potentially affect my subscribers.

So I go through the seemingly quick process of moving my feeds – I mean I have no choice in the matter after all. There is no work around here, no way to view my feed information, no way to access my actual FeedBurner account, until I go through the process of moving them to my Google account…and all seems well.

Until of course my blog broadcast goes out the following Tuesday with ten old blog posts from December, most of which were a series from my 12 Days of Christmas Giveaway promotion. How could Google be so careless to allow this to happen? I mean Google isn’t exactly a Mickey Mouse setup…they are Google for heaven’s sake.

So to my subscribers, I do apologize for the hiccup of last Tuesday and hope that you didn’t miss the actual new posts that included Freebie Friday – Douglas Vitkauskas Fonts and Creative Spotlight: Wee Walk for Clyde’s Hope. As for Google, well, I hope they have fixed the problem for others by now instead of letting everyone fend for themselves in a situation that we had no say so over.

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