It's very sad. FeedFlare has been broken for over a week now.<p>This article is rather loaded though:<p><i>Subscriber count chicklets: Nobody believes them. Nobody cares.</i><p>Since when? They're very useful, particularly to advertisers judging a market.<p><i>There are other ways to measure your RSS reach.</i><p>Like?<p><i>Feed flares: Most of these are useless junk.</i><p>When they work, they're pretty useful. I've had a lot of success with people coming in from RSS readers to comment on the site when they see other people have commented via the Feed Flare. Same for people adding to del.icio.us. Desktop feed readers don't have "add to delicious" buttons.<p>I do agree with the general sentiment of the piece though.
It's a shame that FeedBurner stagnated after Google acquired them, but there's still not anything out there even remotely close to a viable alternative. It doesn't seem fair to beat them up just because they haven't given us <i>even more</i> free services, when their fundamental product is still great.
This seems like a perfect time for someone to build a new FeedBurner. And while you're collecting all those feeds, build a better feed reader too so I can finally give up dealing with Bloglines' issues (GReader is not an alternative for me).