That White Blur You Saw.

Was a glacier passing by while I wait for my RSS feed to update.

I’ve used Feedburner to push my RSS feed for as long as I can remember.  For a long time, I was generally happy with it.  Lately, and in particular since I made the mandated move to Google, my feed takes forever to update.  This, of course, means that it can take an hour or longer (and sometimes forever) before my new posts show up in Google Reader and other feed readers.  If this is happening to me, it is undoubtedly happening to lots of others.  Speed is everything on the net, but the goods, both inbound and outbound, are in slow motion.

RSS needs to be faster.  I don’t know what the alternatives to Feedburner are, if any, without losing your subscribers, but if things don’t get faster fast, I’m going to go looking.

This mess, along with the closing of Google Notebook, etc., raises a related and perhaps even more troubling issue.  The reason lots of us chose and continue to use applications developed or bought by the Googles and Yahoos of the world is brand permanence- the idea that you can trust products owned by these big, rich companies to always be there.  I’m not so sure that’s the case any longer.

I’ll worry about that later.  Right now I just want faster feeds.

UPDATE: I followed the instructions in item 4 of this post, and, at least in the case of this post, that seemed to speed things up.  We’ll see, but I am hopeful.