Joop Dorresteijn who is known as an editor for The Next Web, has found a great backdoor for artificially manipulating the feed count of a blogs FeedBurner chicklet. Basically, its a very simple hack - all you need is an OPML file with the same feed url copied and pasted as many times as you want and then importing that file this into your NetVibes account.

This video explains how it works :


Feedburner hacked! from Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten on Vimeo.

I really appreciate Joop for exposing this hack so that FeedBurner can  fix this issue soon. Personally, I wouldn’t advise anyone to try this hack because its just silly and might get your feedburner account in trouble.  Inflating your subscriber count may sound like a cool thing to do but when they fix this whole thing you will suddenly drop from 10,000 subscribers to say 100. How cool will that be then?