Why is Feedburner trouble again?

So, David Winer came out with this post about Feedburner being trouble. Now, long time (or even short time) readers of this blog know that I’m all for Google having bought Feedburner. David didn’t like Feedburner for some reason in the first place and now that Big Bad Google bought them likes it even less. The post starts out with some, big companies are bad rhetoric, but I think the point of it lies here:

When Feedburner first came online I warned that there was danger in giving so much power to one company.

and here:

So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone. Reader software might have trouble working with it.

Wait, what? First of all, what power have we granted Feedburner, the right to take on the bandwidth burden (and for many sites, this is no small amount of bandwidth) for us? And the right to come up with fancy ways to suss out readership numbers (which is no easy task)? Does he also complain about Google Analytics? For providing us with free online web stats? There’s nothing really that competes with that (for free) and pretty much the entire web is using it (even if they use other products as well) and web stats is both critical data and an important service..

Does Feedburner have power over me? If it worked such that Feedburner magically scraped my site and built all my rss feeds for me and I didn’t actually already have all the RSS feeds already built (just like everyone else who uses feedburner) then maybe they’d have power over me, since they controlled the data. Fortunately, I have the data, the original RSS feed is mine, so exactly what can Feedburner do to me in David’s apocalyptic world?

This is fundamentally different than the problems one might have, for example, with Microsoft having so much power over the office world with Word and Excel. There they actually do control your data - in order to access your data and give it to other people you must continue to use Office and so must the people you are trying to deal with. That’s real power, it comes from control. Feedburner has a little control over you audience and no control over your data - there’s all sorts of ways to migrate off Feedburner with little or no damage to your audience - so Feedburner doesn’t actually have all that much power over you.

Then on to the second part of the crazy talking, sure it is within the real of possibility that Google would somehow decide to break RSS with Feedburner. First let’s assume that they actually do this, well, then you have to migrate off Feedburner. Either to the brand new Feedburner that springs up instantly to take it’s place with a standard feed (and if you don’t believe that will happen, apparently you’ve not been on the same interwebs that I’ve been on) or you simply point people directly at your own original feed and suck up the bandwidth costs. Wow, that’s a nightmare.

But of course they aren’t going to decide to change their feed to a different non-conforming spec overnight without warning. What is the point of that question? No significant company would. Even Microsoft wouldn’t do it overnight without warning. Google’s changing the interface of Analytics, the interface, and they gave you a couple months warning and had the two interfaces running side by side for weeks. No talk from David about “What if analytics suddenly decided to count pageviews and visits differently as well as halving any pageviews coming from microsoft or yahoo?? What will we all do then??” This crazy scenario, though, demonstrates that Google actually has significantly more power over you with GA than Feedburner. Here they control your data - you can switch off them, but the cost to you is the entire stats history of your website - you lose the ability to compare easily (or at all in some cases if stat numbers vary significantly as they do from service to service) current and historical data.

Ugh, I really should stop reading David Winer.

Jul 22nd, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: google · rant