Enabling social sharing with FeedFlare

Friday, April 23, 2010 | 12:52 PM

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Feed content is being constantly distributed via new channels and endpoints every day.   More and more, these new channels involve sharing your content in social networks and applications such as Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz.

Recently, we launched our Socialize service to help you as the publisher distribute your feed via social networks, with the first network being Twitter.   If you use Blogger, you can already connect your feed to Buzz via the "connected sites" link in Buzz.

But it's equally important in the social world to make sure your subscribers can also share your feed content easily on these social networks.  FeedFlare helps enable this by allowing you to configure links in your feed that promote sharing.   You can do this by going to the Optimize tab FeedBurner and choosing FeedFlare, and then of course, adding some flare.

Now, we won't berate you for only doing the "bare minumum," nor do we recommend having "37 pieces of flare" in your feed - but we do think you should express yourself with at least a little flare that helps your subscribers move your content around these social networks a little easier.

To that end, just yesterday we enabled the official "Post to Google Buzz" FeedFlare in our catalog, which easily allows users to repost your content to Google Buzz, and then automatically updates the label with the number of times it was posted.



These links appear as so in your feed (though the exact presentation will vary depending on where your feed is being displayed):



Also included in our official catalog are "Share on Facebook" and others that may be relevant for your audience.  If you are an old time FeedBurner user, it may be time to revisit your FeedFlare setup and add some of these new ones.

In addition, if you don't see the FeedFlare you need, you can always develop one using the FeedFlare API which is documented in our FeedFlare Developer Guide.

Posted by Steve Olechowski, FeedBurner Team

24 comments:

Kim Woodbridge said...

"Expressing myself with flare" is really making me thing about Office Space.

New Digits said...

This is really great option

farshad said...

hey guys , i think feedburner lack an important feature , named font or style selector . if we could choose our suitable font , that would be perfect, because in Persian feeds we need to use Tahoma Font to show our feeds properly

Maith said...

Great!

Finally the buzz flare! Been waiting for that a long, long time ;)

Thank you very much. Keep it up..

Anonymous said...

Love what google doing awesome, but really I still can't found my self comfortable with it

Justine said...

This is great, except I use Blogger and it already automatically updates Buzz.

Problem I'm having now is the delay in my feeds. Lately, it's been taking over 6 to 8 hours before my feeds actually show up on my google reader. What's up with that? I do use the ping shot and even then, it doesn't seem to help.

It shows up on Twitter just fine though.

Why the delay? How can I improve on the speed?

Thanks!

Hgardner said...

I would love to check out all these new features, too bad there is absolutely NO SUPPORT for Feedburner account issues!! Anyone who can not access their account is simply SOL as Google is completely ignoring the Feedburner Help Center.
Hundreds of posts from people looking for assistance accessing their accounts and no response from Google staff!!

Unknown said...

nice options..

poppedculture said...

I like Socialize but not so much now that it is sending out many posts twice for no apparent reason and there is no contact info for support. Anyone know what can be done?

Unknown said...

@Jeremy - the duplicate tweet problem was a bug due to us temporarily moving from one data center to another. We've identified the issue and are fixing so this doesn't happen again.

Dragonfly Paths said...

I love Google and use their tools almost 100% of the time. The sites are great and filled with tons of ideas, help and other information.
My only real issue is the help and support on a couple of services. Feedburner is one of the biggest ones, I don't mean 'live' support or anything like that, I mean topics and help articles in them. It tells you what's wrong, then what needs to be fixed, but not how to fix it.
You are sent to the 'help forum' where you ask and people answer you. You may get 5 or 6 different directions, which individually work perfectly, but listed on the same post can be very confusing to a novice.
Thats when the questions start, and I have seen more then a few 'contributers' get testy in their replies and I can understand why. Because they are answering the same things over and over again. But every 'tech' has their own language, wording, even paths to take to complete it. Unfortunately the novice doesn't understand or realize sometimes that just because one tech said to do a particular fix one way, that doesn't mean others will or that other issues that seem similar to the novice can be corrected.
It just seems like it may be easier to include the steps to fix it in the content or may be to link the top answers to the questions to the page instead of people posting the same question, though worded differently over and over.
Just a thought.......

Thanks again for everything you all do, I (and millions of others) would be completely lost without it!

Peace and Take Care!
Colleen
Exploring Life's Paths

Anonymous said...

nice feature. Please change del.icio.us to delicious.com; the service switched domains in 2008. Thanks

Emma said...

I love feedburner features. But my feedburner was created with my blogger gmail id. My Adsense account was created on another gmail id. So my feeds are not getting updated. I'm confused what to do now?

Thomasin Durgin said...

I have been clicking the "add titter account" for tow days and all I get is a 500 server error. Do I have to use adsense to make use of this feature?

Unknown said...

I really like the idea of feed flare. It does have an office space feel to it but it gets me even more excited about my blog and my other social networks such as twitter, facebook, foursquare and others.

John Powers
Restaurant Agent
Restaurants4SaleOnline.com

Anonymous said...

Adding the twitter feature results on a constant 500 error. Please check it and let me know if everyone is running into this problem. Thanks

Anonymous said...

It is now considered an essential step especially for blogs to add a "Share this on xyzsocialbookmarkingsite" widget. However the complex scripts of such widgets that are added to blog's template (Already stuffed with loads of other scripts) adversely affect blog loading time and hence search engine rankings.
Feedflare is much better in this respect because of its simplicity. However it needs to polished to match other such widgets look and function-wise. Incidentally I have also written a post describing Feedflare at my blog DiGi-PASSION.

Hadedyite Sammy said...

I agree with you feedburner need to step up

99 said...

It's not delivering "email the author" messages.

Tom Retterbush said...

Feedburner is getting better and better. I just purchased a custom domain through Blogger.com and so far so good. It took only minutes for my site to be up and running under my new domain name. I just wonder how long it will take Feedburner to catch up. Particularly since I have several feed subscribers.

M.R.Islam said...

Hey guys , i think feedburner lack an important feature , named font or style selector . if we could choose our suitable font , that would be perfect, because in Persian feeds we need to use Tahoma Font to show our feeds properly

Shoei Gift Shop said...

Great feature. Save time to bookmark for each article.

eLeNHa said...

I Like it...!!!

VINOD said...

Lovely feature !!