What about Feedburner?

Wednesday, August 1, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Continuing the Status of the Platform story... 

5. You know I've been writing about Feedburner, and its potential of being a disaster for the RSS micro-industry. An email from Daniel McKeown this morning got me thinking, why don't we fix the problem? Maybe because most programmers have good log analysis software, or we have our hosting act down, or know how to manage domains, the idea of a creating an open source Feedburner never occurs to us. But if we see an oil spill coming, shouldn't we be investing in technology to clean up oil spills? Or maybe we should take some steps now to avoid spills? 

One of the things I've heard over and over from non-technical users who have the same concerns now that Feedburner is owned by Google, is where do we go if we want to switch? Ahh. There is no place to go.  

If there was only one company that made mail servers or one company that hosted blogs, how quickly would there be a second and third, and how quickly would software emerge that allowed you to host your own? And why hasn't this happened with Feedburner, and maybe it's time that it did? 

Todd Sawicki likes the idea of an open source competitor to Feedburner.