Have you noticed an inflated number on your Feedburner counter lately? Don’t worry. It is not a technical problem. Feedburner has recently started to count your FriendFeed subscribers. Previously it was counting your normal RSS subscribers and Aweber opt in subscribers. All in all it has started to count normal RSS subscribers, Aweber opt-in, and FriendFeed subscribers.

Probably this change will increase the  gap between the most popular bloggers and normal bloggers in terms of social proof. Most of the bloggers still take the number of RSS subscribers as the key element when deciding about a blog’s performance. As popular bloggers have quite a lot of  subscribers in FriendFeed (if they use it since very long time), their FeedBurner counters will also increase a lot.

This change also explains why all of a sudden John Chow joined FriendFeed. He regularly adds new subscribers these days. The idea is simple: once you subscribe a member, he or she will probably subscribe back.

So if you are also obsessed about the number of your RSS subscribers, do the same. Join FriendFeed, and subscribe to as many users as possible. In the end you will be able to increase the number of your RSS subscribers.

While doing so, don’t forget to subscribe me: http://friendfeed.com/merkal2005