Feedburner is working hard to take complete control over your RSS feeds. People using Blogger service can convert Atom feeds to RSS feeds using Feedburner. You can integrate your Flickr photographs and del.icio.us, Furl or Bloglines links into your Feedburner feeds. And if somebody is not viewing your XML feeds in the RSS reader, feedburner decorates them to look more "browser friendly".Feedburner has introduced another nice feature "Pingshot" that automatically notifies aggregators, blog search engines and other pinging services when your feed has been updated or when you publish new content for them to crawl and index your site.
Matt from Pingomatic is calling Pingshot a great service but in my opinion, Pingshot service adds little value and will only increase the load on pinging services.
Pingshot currently notifies Technorati, MyYahoo, PubSub, Ping-o-matic, NewsGator, Feedster, Icerocket and Weblogs.com. But the original favorite pinging service - "Ping-o-Matic" - already notifies these services and dozen of others. Why is Feedburner doing duplicate work ? Feedburner just needs to ping "Pingomatic" which is already smart enough to notify all the other pinging services.
With Pingshot, the same information is sent to the same pinging server but from different sources multiple times.
Say if you are write a new post on Blogger and publish it. Blogger automatically pings Weblogs.com. If you enabled Pingshot services, it will also ping Weblogs.com and Pingomatic which will again ping Weblogs.com - And weblogs.com is a smart guy. The first time you ping it, it says "Thanks for the ping" but if you ping it often in short intervals, you are shown the door "Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every half-hour"
There's another potential problem of "Round Trip Pinging" with Feedburner Pingshot - Feedburner pings Pingomatic which pings Feedburner server back. Hope Pingshot is smart enough to handle this round-trip error. When you try this with Pingomatic, it is quick to remark "Slow down cowboy! You're pinging us too fast"
My personal favorite is Pingoat - sports a clean interface and pings the maximum number of services include non-english ones. This pinging bookmark sits on my Firefox Bookmarks toolbar and before calling my day off, I click it once. Neat and Simple.
Find this article at: http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/09/feedbuner-pingshot-is-only-duplicating.html
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
Hi, thanks for taking the time to take a close look at PingShot. While I agree we are leveraging a lot of existing services, I would like to point out a couple of key features. I think the first thing that distinquishes our service is that it pings on your behalf automatically as a result of FeedBurner detecting a change of content - it is a set and forget kind of service...
AND it does it after applying any of our services... so, for example, if you didn't change your blog but did add pictures to your stream and you splice them together using FeedBurner, we will pick that up and ping services for you.
I the issue of over-pinging is a real one and we have throttles and traps in place to make sure we are only pinging when content has really changed since the last time we pinged a particular service... though "transitive pinging" is possible, we are discussing how to throttle/detect that too
finally... the "Round Trip Pinging" issue you brought up... I agree that is a concern and we trap for that.
Oveall, I think this is a service that will appeal especially to people who have heard about "pinging" and want to get the advantages from it without becoming experts in it.
I hope this addresses some of your concerns and again thank you for looking so closely and keeping us honest :)
chris frye
vp engineering
FeedBurner
Written on 24/9/05 5:56 PM
oh sorry, I meant to include this Q/A from our PingShot FAQ
"So does this replace Ping-O-Matic or other ping services?
No. This is a passive "set and forget" service and only functions for publishers for whom we are managing feeds. We check your feed, and IF your content has been updated since we last checked, then we initiate our ping algorithm and notify the publisher-selected channels that there has been an update. You can use our service to notify Ping-O-Matic, which will in turn relay updates to other services."
Written on 24/9/05 6:01 PM
"Oveall, I think this is a service that will appeal especially to people who have heard about "pinging" and want to get the advantages from it without becoming experts in it..."
So does this mean that if you want to use Pingomatic or some other service, it's best not to enable Pinshot? Or does it matter?
Thanks
-Jeffery
Written on 3/10/05 11:52 PM
I believe that pingshot has some intelliegence behind it. If you have Pingomatic enabled, it will not ping any pingomatic services.
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Written on 31/10/06 11:32 AM
Hi Amit,
Thanks for the beautiful article. I have a few questions about sending pings.
1- Do you still recommend the "Pingoat"?
2- Do we have to send ping through it anytime that we update our weblog OR we have to do it just once everyday and no more.
3- Can sending too many pings causes your weblog to be banned?
Best regards,
Vahid
Written on 25/12/06 7:36 AM