Not sure if it’s Google Reader or FeedBurner, but this is not cool:

Skitch.com > samharrelson > GoogReaderFail

Six hours of latency. Six.

Track will kill the RSS star.

Earlier this week, I lamented on Google’s poor handling of FeedBurner since acquiring the service.

Instead of capitalizing on FeedBurner’s large amount of inertia and kind feelings towards the service from the influence-sphere of bloggers, Google has relegated FeedBurner to the back shelf of its growing collection of dolls and toys.

In a post about the coming possibilities of a “ping economy” (attention economy?), Steve Gillmor points out the growing latency (ie impotency) of FeedBurner and how Google has mis-handled RSS notifications within Google Reader in general:

The Realtime Ping Server: “Whatever the case, and whether or not we’re correctly implementing a ping or not, the notion that blog posts are effectively removed from a realtime audience which is increasingly dominant is mindbogglingly stupid. Some even suggest there are competitive reasons for this lack of a strategy, but I can’t quite construct a convincing rationale for it to date. However, I will throw out the apparent fact that Google makes much more from Web pages than they do from RSS pages.

Inevitably, FriendFeed will roll out Track, and so will Twitter in short order, perhaps even sooner than FriendFeed’s smaller team can prioritize it. Until then, we will continue to model our Twitter cloud in FriendFeed constructs, make do with a lack of filtering tools to constrain the friend-of-a-friend overspill, and look to other players (Microsoft in particular) to compete directly with Feedburner at the RSS routing layer. There is no reason why RSS can’t be an effective protocol at the realtime layer, and FriendFeed’s growing arsenal of features is both a roadmap and a toolkit for the transition.

Note: I am publishing this post at 3:31PM Pacific time.

Update: 5:01PM No RSS.

Update: 5:52PM Still broken.”

Such a shame. FeedBurner could have taken blogging and pinging to the 2.0 level with more instantaneous notifications of updates. Instead, Google placed more “relevant” ads on our feeds and moved on.

Nothing to see there (except the ads, of course).

I agree with Scoble here on the “broken” nature of blog commenting on the social web (especially when you have a blog that deals directly with social media):

Scobleizer — Tech geek blogger » Blog Archive Why blogging comments suck «: “How do you fix this? Not easily. I wish there were a system where I could tell my readers when a comment came in that deserves a lot more attention than the others. Also, I wish we could see the social network of the people commenting (I’d love to have their Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed networks show up linked into their comment somehow and also have warnings when people leave me comments that have a huge amount of social capital, like Gary does).”

Comments have been a frustrating part of keeping this blog going since 2006. Things were great when this was a “small” blog with just a few subscribers, but with time and growth, spammers, spam queues, etc quickly get out of hand.

This isn’t just because of spam. Actually, spam is the least of my frustrations (it blows, but dealing with spam is like going to the dentist…you can avoid both, but your teeth will fall out). As Robert says, it is completely ridiculous that comments from all over the web aren’t better aggregated into our blogs. If we’re going to run these things and put out content that elicits responses on a number of platforms, it is reasonable to assume that there would be a way to keep everything at least organized on the originating blog itself.

When I installed Disqus in Fall of ‘07, I prayed that a solution had been found. Things are getting better between Disqus and Intense Debate, but commenting is still a painful thorn in the side of any blogger.

I’d love just to close comments here and shift everyone to use FriendFeed as a place to discuss the contents here. Alas, not everyone is on FriendFeed. I’m still considering it, though. Late adopters and luddites be damned.

I talk a good deal about Twitter’s deafeningly absent (but once very present) Track feature because Track was helping to usher in a new paradigm of finding information in a post-google age until the revolutionary functionality was thrown out with the bath water of scalability earlier this year as Twitter sought to sure itself up.

I still have faith and hope that Track will be restored to Twitter (or a similar service with significant uptake… what Identi.ca could have been but never matured into) in some capacity, even if its in a “Pro” package. There’s just too much potential to let the idea and implementation of Track disappear into scalability limbo.

I’m glad to see there are services trying to fill the gap between minutes and hours of latency with RSS with a more real time experience. One of those services is notify.me:

notify.me - About Us: “notify.me delivers notifications that interest you in near real time. It eliminates the need for you to constantly check on classified listings, blogs or social networking sites. Notifications are pushed to your destinations of choice such as instant messenger, mobile phone, email, desktop or web application. “

I’ve been using the service for the past week. While the response time is dependent on the actual services being observed, it is a good clearing house for info that you need to get sooner than later.

There’s nothing like the real thing, but it’s good to see the drive towards real time discoverability picking up steam with other services.