[iDC] Will you delete your Feedburner account?

[Ryan Shaw]

On Jun 7, 2007, at 5:22 AM, Trebor Scholz wrote:

> GOOGLE now owns Blogger, Writely, Dodgeball, Feedburner, YouTube, and
> Picasa. EBay took over Stumbleupon and Skype. YAHOO snatched up
> Facebook, Del.icio.us, WebJay, Jumpcut, Upcoming.org, and Oddpost.

Yahoo doesn't own Facebook--their offer was rejected.

> It is foolish to naturalize capitalism, as many do, by arguing that  
> only
> greedy big business can support large-scale social life.

Perhaps, but it is equally foolish to ignore well-established historical
patterns of periods of consolidation following periods of technological
and entrepreneurial innovation. Greedy big businesses can exploit  
economies
of scale to support large-scale social life much more efficiently than
start-ups. Many of the start-ups you mention above were on the verge
of technical collapse before their acquisitions. They needed the  
resources
of a large company (cheap bandwidth, cheap processing) to grow beyond
their small early adopter communities.

Craigslist, like Amazon, Yahoo, and Google, didn't need to be acquired
because they were early entrants who grabbed the lion's share of the
market. The only difference is that Craig Newmark elected to keep the
company in (mostly) private hands (eBay owns a stake).

That said, I won't deny that such consolidation presents a problem for
those who have fantasized about a cyberspace that somehow exists outside
of corporate and political centers of power. I personally am  
uncomfortable
with Google owning my feed statistics (especially since they already own
my feed *reading* statistics since I use Google Reader). But I doubt  
I'll
switch, because I don't know of any alternatives that do what Feedburner
does.

Google Streetview bothers me far more than the Feedburner acquisition,
though.