For the best few days, I’ve been trying to edit the settings in my Feedburner account – the RSS feeds service that was once so useful, but since its purchase by Google, seems to have languished. Unfortunately, it seems I’ve forgotten my password (though I used the same one for Feedburner as many other similar services), and the user name I thought I always used is getting bounced back to me as not recognized. I’ve tried nearly every single variation of a user name, password, and email address I’ve ever had, and none work. Without user name or email, I can’t retrieve my password.
Now the fun begins.
Searchblog’s feed was moved, I think, to Google by the deadline of late Feb. of this year. My engineering group at FM did it for me, which was very kind. Given that the user name and passwords they used to do the move seem to not work anymore, we started looking for some kind of help – it’s sort of odd that while my feeds seem to work, no one can log in to manage them. I read through the FAQ, and it said that if I was an AdSense publisher, my feed would be there. I am, so I logged in, but there was no feed I could find. Odd.
SO I asked my crack engineering team to try and make sense of it. They couldn’t. Here’s Ivan’s response:
This is wild, the Feedburner site is like a labyrinth, I don’t see any way to contact a human. People in the forums are also complaining about inability to find any type of contact form. Dozens of recent posts in the support group of people saying they can’t recover their password to migrate to Google Account — no response from anyone.
It feels like a dead product.
Anyone have any ideas on how to fix this issue?
Beyond the irritation of a broken or non-communicative service, I’ve come to realize that Feedburner simply isn’t very useful to me anymore. Two years ago, when Google bought the company for $100 million, it was a crucial and growing service. I’d log in nearly every day. What value is it providing to them – or any of you – now?
UPDATE: A nice fellow from Google pinged me this morning offering to help. Thanks!
might be obvious but did you try logging in with your _google account_ at http://feedburner.google.com and check what feeds you have there?
Hey Thomas. I did try that a while back, and will again. However, the FAQ says if I am an AdSense publisher it should be there. Then again, I do have multiple accounts at Google (a source of even more headaches) so will try that.
Wow, I am so happy you are writing about this as maybe it might change something at Google. I have had multiple problems with FeedBurner (especially with the FeedFlare option) and have been unable to contact a human being.
The only way I can login and edit settings is opening the link in the welcome email I received from them a while ago. Maybe this solves your problem.
I am not sure if Google has another product that can substitute for FeedBurner, but it feels as if they are letting it die…
I have two feedburner accts, and finally just migrated the second one, so thx for the reminder 😉
Seems to be working fine logging in with two different google accounts.
man oh man! here i was thinking if i was the only one. one fine day, i tried logging in and boom..no more feeds. i logged in with what i thought was my old feedburner account.
then- thinking i might have screwed up, i tried each and every google-ish account i have, but nope- my feeds were nowhere to be found. i was going to burn a new feed.
now- i just go with whatever stats wordpress offers. does anyone know of a good alternative to feedburner?
Time to consider a supported RSS alternative? FeedBlitz now has an RSS service (http://www.feedblitz.com/rssfaq.asp) as well as its established RSS to mail, Twitter and IM services.
I have to say that I have been disappointed in what’s happened to Feedburner as well. One day it tells me that I have 16k subscribers, then next day it is 10k, then next it is 9k. When Feedburner was independent, it wasn’t this way.
John, you are fortunate to have enough reach that you got some attention from Google.
I’ve had problems for months and asked for help in the forums, with zero success, just as others have stated here and you originally experienced.
Seems like there is a huge opportunity here for Feedblitz, or a new competitor to make a move here.
Thanks for sharing your problems on this John, I’ve also had real difficulty getting my Feedburner account to work. The switch to having to use a Google account to login only seems to have confused the matter further!
If there are many good viable options out there then please share them here so that we can move away from Feedburner. Seems like Google really doesn’t care enough about this product which is a real shame as it would link in well into something like Analytics.
If someone from Google would like to contact me that would be great….
When I use Feedburner I always use their MyBrand service: http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mybrand
That way I’m still in control and even if Google/Feedburner would change the service in the future I can keep my own feed address without loosing any subscribers.
Anyway, nice to hear that it was sorted out.
We’ve got the same problem with our company blog at http://sharepointsolutions.blogspot.com.
Something happened when Google migrated our Feedburner account over and there is no longer anyway for us to log in.
The feed keeps getting burned just fine, but we don’t get any of the benefits of having Feedburner in the first place.
The bad part is that if we migrate to another solution we will have to start all over in terms of displaying our number of subscribers on our blog. That doesn’t sound very good to us since it has taken a long time to build up our subscriber level to what it is today and we hope by displaying the stats it encourages new subscribers.
We are a long-time (5 years) Adwords customer and we had the same problems with Adwords customer service until a year or so ago – basically, there was none. Eventually, over time we spent enough with Adwords to get an account rep, but we had to cut back last fall with the economy tanking and we no longer spend enough to be able to talk to a human.
The bottom line is that Google’s customer service ain’t that hot and I guess they don’t have to be all that good at it because of their market share.
Jeff Cate
President
SharePoint Solutions
this post, it’s really well written. Are you going to blog more on this? It looks like there’s more material here for more
I have a similar problem. It was possible to merge my adsense account with the feedburner account, not for 100%!
I get all my feeds with my adsense login, but can’t use them in adsense. There are no feeds while creating ads 🙁
I hope I will get it working after more than a year…
My sister is having the same problem… is there anyway you could put me in contact with the guy who helped you? We have tried everything we can to figure out her login.
thanks!
Hello John,
I’m having a frustrating time trying to fix an issue with a Feedburner ad that won’t die… a leftover from the transition to AdSense. Anyway, I’m desperately trying to find a way to contact a real, live Feedburner employee to help find a quick fix. Do you still have contact info?