[iDC] Will you delete your Feedburner account?

[Burak Arikan]

Hi Andreas,

I was actually looking for an alternative feed stats service. I like  
the name of your service RSSvp.

I think switching to an alternative service is definitely essential.  
But I think one can hardly resist the services provided by this  
company Feedburner. All those sugar graphs, detailed interfaces, and  
network effects. As you mentioned, building such "quality" tools  
needs labor, so capital. However, I think the former, network  
effects, is not closely tied to capital, although it is obviously the  
major force that makes the social web2.0 worlds irresistible. I feel  
like initiating independent snow balls –in various contexts– on the  
web is possible for many people with the existing open source tools,  
languages, and frameworks.

This ties to having many alternatives. But still, to maintain it, in  
other words to grow a sustainable network effect, one will eventually  
need capital. After the network effect emerges, of course you have to  
scale the servers and bandwidth. So how is it possible to have many  
alternative network effects?

Maybe we need something like credit union banks, collective financial  
systems, to grow open service providers.

burak


On Jun 7, 2007, at 9:18 AM, Andreas Schiffler wrote:

>
> 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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