So apparently, as of today if you’ve imported your blog into your friendfeed timeline, those that subscribe to your feed in friendfeed are now considered to be part of your subcriptions along with Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo and anywhere else people can subscribe to your blog.  Read the post about it here.  This means feedburner and other subscription tools will include those subscriptions in your stats.  The response from the social web? An overwhelming #FAIL.

RSS subcription statistics are a useful tool that allows you to see how many of your readers are committed to reading your publication on a regular basis.  When someone adds your feed to their google reader, or Blogline, or any of these services, they receive all of your new posts whenever you write them.  This is not necessarily the case with Friendfeed.  In fact, this is hardly ever the case.  To name just a few reasons why this new addition sucks:

1. There are a number of reasons why someone might subscribe to your Friendfeed (FF).  The concept of friendfeed is that you can import your updates from a number of different services, including your blog, twitter, facebook, and more.  That means that someone may subscribe to me because they’re interested in my twitter and facebook updates without ever really having interest in my blog.
2. You are forced to either read everything in other reader tools.  I use google reader, and if someone posts a new blog post, I can either read it, or just click “mark as read” but the point is that I’m aware that a new post exists.  On FF, similar to twitter, you can miss a post, and unless you go back to check if it’s there, you’ll have no idea you missed it.
3. Friendfeed isn’t as active as it may claim to be. Not too long ago, friendfeed launched a new feature where you can import all of your twitter contacts and automatically subscribe to them on friendfeed.  I did this.  I never use Friendfeed.  That means I am counted as a subscriber to a lot of peoples’ blogs/publications because I follow them on FF when in actuality, I don’t ever read their blog.  I know that this is the same case for many others in the blogosphere.

See how wrong this addition is now?  A statistic that is supposed to represent readers who are loyal, regular readers, is now including people that never read your blog.  The whole import your twitter contacts thing seemed to be nothing more than a buzz builder to get people talking about Friendfeed.  I’m really hoping that this isn’t the same, because it’s really messing up a valuable service.

When I boot up my computer in the morning I don’t start working right away. Instead, I spend 10-30 minutes reading online news and blogs posts. I don’t think I’m alone here; reading online has become the modern equivalent of reading the morning paper (which will be gone soon anyway).

How do you determine what to read? There’s an infinite quanity of reading material available on the internet, and everyone has a different approach to finding what’s most interesting. A few common tactics:

• Use an RSS reader, which pipes your favorite bloggers and news sources into a single place
• Go to a single news source (e.g. NY Times) and browse their new content
• Go to a social news site (e.g. Digg, Reddit) and browse content that other people have found interesting

Of these three approaches, I’m partial to using an RSS reader. I find #2 (single news source) too limiting–my favorite authors write for different blogs/publications, and I’d hate to limit myself to just one. I find #3 (social news site) too random and unreliable. Sites like Reddit certainly have interesting articles, but they are often curiosities which are not focused on my particular interests. If I relied only on Reddit, I would miss a lot of important news.

Scribnia meshes with the RSS reader approach. We believe most people’s reading habits involve reading the same authors every day. I know that when I check out the new content from the bloggers in my RSS Reader (Google Reader), there will be a lot of articles I find interesting.

We want Scribnia to be a powerful tool that will help you discover new authors worth adding to your daily reading list. We see ourselves as an alternative to other social news sites like Digg and Reddit. Our “competition” helps you read online by recommending random pieces of content, but we help you by recommending authors you can come back to every day.