LaBoX

For the past week or so, users of both Google Feedburner and Yahoo! Pipes once again are having problems, yes this is not the first time, feeds from Yahoo! Pipes sources are not getting through Feedburner. In other words, do not be surprise if you have feeds that seem to have stopped updating, they are probably using Pipes+Feedburner.

I have two solutions… (And maybe, by the time you read this, it has been a few days since.)

Follow up:

But before I present my crazy solutions, it is interesting to note that the problem lies not on one particular service but on two. At first look it appears that Feedburner is the one having the problem, after all Pipes feeds are working. Then you start to think that maybe Pipes is the one at fault because Feedburner works as usual. So what really is happening?

From the Pipes team perspective (and Feedburner is silent on this issue this time), Google changed the IP addresses of Feedburner again, this time, they moved Feedburner services to their global network. On Yahoo!’s end, they have to whitelist the new IP addresses of Feedburner. Simple? Maybe.

But according to a Pipes representative, Google gave them 500,000 IP Addresses! Yahoo! of course is hesitant. We can think of plenty of reasons why they are hesitant but it is definitely not “we’re not going to manually add 500,000 IP addresses” (you can whitelist (or blacklist) all the IP addresses in the world (IPv4 and IPv6) via a simple script). Whatever their reason(s) is, we can be sure that it is valid.

Who’s paying the price for this game? The end-users, you and me, us. The only solution (or solutions) I can think of is this:

• Yahoo! starts their own feedburner service; and/or
• Google starts their own pipes service

As I have said earlier, this is not the first time this happened, and this will definitely not the last. As an end-user, I do not want another round of Google Feedburner and Yahoo! Pipes issue to surface again. I do not want waking up on a good Monday or Saturday morning only to find out that my Feedburner feeds are dead again.

That is my solution. Yahoo! and/or Google should start their own version of each other’s services in this case. I will switch to a “Yahoo! Feedburner” or “Google Pipes” whichever comes out first and whichever offers a much better service and range of features.

For now, all we can do is pray.

Read: Yahoo!’s response to this issue