Feedburner is trouble, day 2

Monday, July 23, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Saturday's post about Feedburner was much-discussed, and that's good.  

The most common rebuttal from people who didn't agree was the user's ability to opt out. If you don't like it you don't have to use Feedburner. But that's not any kind of a rebuttal at all. Let me illustrate. 

First, I don't like Feedburner, and I don't use it, never have, never will. 

However, if Google, the new owner of Feedburner ties Feedburner to Google Reader, that still hurts people who opted out of Feedburner, because my feed, that isn't served through Feedburner, doesn't work as well with Google Reader. 

If you doubt this is possible, read this comment by Kevin Marks, who works at Google. 

It's not only possible, but it's the way the tech business works and always has worked. 

Now let's take a deeper look at "doesn't work as well." 

It could end up meaning "doesn't work at all." It's quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn't be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped created a long list of Google products that "prefer" other Google products. I've never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn't think that way, sorry to say.  

The ability of one user to opt out would do absolutely nothing to stop or even diminish the negative effects of monopolistic tying. And users show absolutely no inclination to do anything for the sole benefit of the Internet as a whole, so there's no reason to believe any of them would withhold their support of Feedburner just because it screws with the benefits of an open RSS ecosystem. 

Note that I'm not asking anyone to do anything, and I'm not even saying Google is doing anything wrong, I'm just marking the moment.