feedburner was an appropriate name

sull 6:08 PM on September 2, 2009 Permalink | Short Url | Tweet | Reply | Comments RSS

Category: macroblog | Tags: feedburner, rant, twitter (17)

Just reading this news on Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO…

Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo To Become Twitter COO.

wanted to point out how i never liked feedburner and encouraged people to manage and own their own feeds themselves. in a nutshell…. feedburner could have and should have been replaced with a few really good tutorials on how to make RSS or edit existing RSS (ie on wordpress). feedburner took advantage of the lazy blogger and attempted to monetize the fuck out of it with a fallover of simply controlling one of the most ubiquitous and pervasive components of the web.
feedburner BURNED RSS and those who were too lazy to own it themselves.

in essence, this is similar to twitter. twitter is for the lazy blogger as well. and now the plethora of mainstream users who never likely would have blogged or maintain a website for free expression etc… yeah twitter is all that noise. not that there’s anything wrong with that

sull 10:23 PM on September 2, 2009 Permalink | Reply

I left this comment on
http://www.businessinsider.com/feedburner-is-googles-biggest-f-up-2009-9#comment-4a9f2838913ac80224f28a4f

RSS is crucially important to the web. This does not mean that a viable business can be based off of being the primary controller of it, as Feedburner had tried to do.

Feedburner was never necessary. But a few things made it appealing. People love stats. People are lazy.

Instead of learning how to manage and own your RSS feed(s), publisher’s instead chose to use the hip service that would take care of the voodoo. In return, the publishers got to use a poorly designed interface loaded with stupid feature names and cluttered with gimmicky gadgets for stats that was more of a novelty fix than i in depth analysis of reader and traffic patterns.

Google may have thought it wise to swallow Feedburner. And let’s face it, $100million is nothing to Google. Even the nearly $2billion for youtube was an easy transaction for Google. So they can kill an acquisition and not feel like a failure about it. Often, that is why they acquired a company in the first place. Kill momentum. Control momentum. Re-invent and re-ignite momentum under the Google brand.

Google may even want to kill RSS. They may want to forge ahead with Atom + PubSubHubBub and the Wave Protocol and see RSS as a distraction. I don’t know.
but Google has a calculated strategy for everything and what seems like a mistake is not necessarily one. I’m sure that in some cases, disorganization is a factor as well. But we should not assume.

Look on the bright side of the Feedburner debacle. For all I care, FeedBurner could burn down. And in place of that is what should have happened to begin with…. RSS controled, owned and managed by the publishers themselves. It’s not difficult, folks. And it’s good to learn about RSS.

Also of interest is some fun experiments going on with http://rssCloud.org to make RSS move a little faster (like PubSubHubBub).

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