I normally start my day by reading my RSS feeds and checking my blog stats and assorted other things. Imagine my surprise this morning when I checked my blog subscriber count. I glanced at the number and was shocked that it was almost double. I figured there was something being double counted, so I continued to read my RSS feeds. That is when I found the FriendFeed post on subscriber counts:

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.

I understand that they are just trying to help, but the trend is what concerns me. First, let’s look at some numbers of a few blogs and FriendFeed users. This blog had 1544 subscribers yesterday. Today I have 2869 subscribers, with the gain mostly due to people subscribing to my FriendFeed account. Louis Gray’s blog had around 8000 subscribers almost a week ago. Today, it shows that he now has 13814 subs