FeedFlare (or, Stop Changing my Feeds!)

Feedburner released a new feature called FeedFlare that’s pretty clever. It adds a few features to the bottom of your feed items that shows things like an inbound link count from Technorati, comment counts, and lets people email the feed item. Each widget is delivered as an image, preseumably so that FeedBurner can change the contents of the image without changing the contents of the feed itself, preventing items from reappearing in your feed reader.

That’s a nice touch, but it would be better if they’d only apply the new feature to newly-created feed items. The last two days my reader has been clogged with items from FeedBurner-powered feeds. I’ve already seen the items, but since FeedBurner has gone back and inserted FeedFlare on all the old items from feeds, they’re showing up again.