FriendFeed Causing Inaccurate FeedBurner Subscribers?

This morning I checked out my RSS feed subscriber count to see that it had increased dramatically. So I delved a little deeper and found that I had gained fifty-one new subscribers from ‘friendfeedagg’. Very odd, considering during my entire usage of using FeedBurner, that aggregator or feed reader had never been used.

After doing a quick Twitter search I found that I was not the only case. Many other people were reporting similar increases in subscribers.

What is ‘friendfeedagg’? It turns out that yesterday, FriendFeed, enabled a new feature that adds your blog’s FriendFeed subscribers to your FeedBurner stats, as explained here:

So if you have 200 people subscribed to you on FriendFeed, and you’ve added your blog as a service on FriendFeed, now you can see those subscribers right alongside the subscriber counts from Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo, and anyone else subscribed to your blog’s feed.

Here is the issue. Are your FriendFeed subscribers really ’subscribed’ to your weblog? They might not have actually taken interest in your weblog, but instead want to read your comments or see your Flickr images. I’d, personally, be more interested in the subscribers who have gone out and directly subscribed to my weblog, for its content. Not as a side effect of wanting to see another one of my ‘content streams’.

So, the real question is, are subscriber numbers now inaccurate? Will we get to the stage when people ask for our subscriber count, that we automatically subtract the, perhaps disinterested, readers from FriendFeed.

What I’d be interested in seeing is an opt-in for the FeedBurner subscribers. Perhaps a preference that enables me to ignore the subscriber numbers. The problem remains however, for those who may decide to opt-in to glorify their subscriber numbers.

Can we trust that FeedBurner’s stats are accurate? Because, let’s face it, they haven’t been in the past.