According to Joop Dorresteijn over at The Next Web, it’s possible to game Feedburner to artificially inflate the number of subscribers you have, simply by cutting and pasting an OPML file, using NetVibes, and waiting a few hours.
It doesn’t actually increase subscribers (that’s the whole point) but it does inflate the count shown on the chicklet, which could possibly then encourage other visitors to subscribe.
The video example shows the genuine subscriber count on Joop’s personal blog of 43 artificially inflated to nearly 2,600.
The post concludes:
Moral of the story is: everybody can have a lot of Feedburner readers, which makes the service questionable as a measurement of performance. It’s up to Google/Feedburner to fix things up.
It’s arguable how much worth this hack has, but nevertheless it’s definitely one that should be closed up.
Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.
(Via The Next Web)
