Feedbuner Pingshot is only duplicating work

Feedburner is working hard to take complete control over your RSS feeds. People using Blogger service can convert Atom feeds to RSS feeds using Feedburner. You can integrate your Flickr photographs and del.icio.us, Furl or Bloglines links into your Feedburner feeds. And if somebody is not viewing your XML feeds in the RSS reader, feedburner decorates them to look more “browser friendly”.

Feedburner has introduced another nice feature “Pingshot” that automatically notifies aggregators, blog search engines and other pinging services when your feed has been updated or when you publish new content for them to crawl and index your site.

Matt from Pingomatic is calling Pingshot a great service but in my opinion, Pingshot service adds little value and will only increase the load on pinging services.

Pingshot currently notifies Technorati, MyYahoo, PubSub, Ping-o-matic, NewsGator, Feedster, Icerocket and Weblogs.com. But the original favorite pinging service - “Ping-o-Matic” - already notifies these services and dozen of others. Why is Feedburner doing duplicate work ? Feedburner just needs to ping “Pingomatic” which is already smart enough to notify all the other pinging services.

With Pingshot, the same information is sent to the same pinging server but from different sources multiple times.

Say if you are write a new post on Blogger and publish it. Blogger automatically pings Weblogs.com. If you enabled Pingshot services, it will also ping Weblogs.com and Pingomatic which will again ping Weblogs.com - And weblogs.com is a smart guy. The first time you ping it, it says “Thanks for the ping" but if you ping it often in short intervals, you are shown the door "Thanks for the ping, however we can only accept one ping every half-hour”

There’s another potential problem of “Round Trip Pinging” with Feedburner Pingshot - Feedburner pings Pingomatic which pings Feedburner server back. Hope Pingshot is smart enough to handle this round-trip error. When you try this with Pingomatic, it is quick to remark “Slow down cowboy! You’re pinging us too fast”

My personal favorite is Pingoat - sports a clean interface and pings the maximum number of services include non-english ones. This pinging bookmark sits on my Firefox Bookmarks toolbar and before calling my day off, I click it once. Neat and Simple.