[iDC] Will you delete your Feedburner account?

[Andreas Schiffler]

To answer you question: Yes - my vote goes to delete your account there. 
And while you are at it, maybe consider dumping other so-called web2.0 
accounts as well.

I was in the RSS business a few years back (http://www.rssvp.com, still 
up and free). Feedburner was one of the early competition. They had VC 
money, a head start and became bigger much faster than my own RSSvp (a 
business running on 'fumes' and savings) because they had a read 
development team and gave away the service for free - so we never had a 
chance to get any traction with more than a handful of customers. We 
also did not have a chance to make money with RSSvp because we were 
trying to do "the right-thing" (TM) in providing a genuine service with 
the 'good' intention of becoming the part of 100s of hardworking 
webmasters trying to give quality RSS feeds to their users. This didn't 
play out for a number of reasons (Microsoft squandering the opportunity 
to drive RSS with their IE7, RSS becoming increasingly 'gummed up' with 
spam, format wars between Podcast formats, etc.)

So Feedburner's business "exit strategy" was likely always to become an 
acquisition target from day one. So their method for getting into this 
position is by:
- becoming a viable advertising platform (that is probably the reason 
Google has bought them) through ad-insertions in Feedburner managed feed 
content
- collect enough data about feed content and user behavior so you have 
something that can be data-mined (and thus be sold to advertisers and 
marketers)
- get big enough to show up on the radar screen of aformentioned 
acquisition sharks with deep pockets
I guess they succeeded.

As for other web2.0 and social venues, my tip would be to look closely: 
if it is big and attracts lots of traffic and users, it probably costs 
money to operate. Therefore the people paying that money are likely 
after making more dough and may have "exit strategies" similar to 
Feedburner.

In that case, it may be time to close your account, move on to something 
smaller and more open and show those greedy bastards the finger! ;-)

--AS


Burak Arikan wrote:
> You've probably following the recent news about the small scale social 
> web 2.0 companies being acquired by giant corporations (e.g., 
> StumbleUpon acquired by Ebay, Feedburner acquired by Google). 
> Feedburner tracks your blog's RSS feed statistics and shows the number 
> of subscribers momentarily, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly. Now 
> all your data is changing hands, from Feedburner to Google.
>
> Feedburner puts a notice in their sign in interface saying that you 
> have a right to opt-out, delete your data. If you take no action by 
> June 15, 2007 (9 days as of today), the rights to your data will 
> transfer from FeedBurner to Google.
>
> I wonder how you feel about it?
>
> I think this is an important moment to pay attention to how inhumane 
> the data ownership laws in USA: One who aggregates data owns it.
>
> burak
>
> Note: I also posted this issue in my blog.
> http://www.burak-arikan.com/blog/
>
>
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