“Feedburner Is Trouble”
Jul 21st, 2007 | By James Lewin | Category: Podcasting ServicesDave Winer, who created RSS 2.0, one of the standards on which podcasting is based, posted an interesting take today on the popular news feed service Feedburner, warning that there’s “danger in giving so much power to one company.”
Feedburner is very popular with podcasters because it can streamline dealing with newsfeeds and offers statistics on podcast “subscribers” and downloads.
“Google owns Feedburner and all their feeds,” notes Winer. “And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone.”
“Technologies work best when there’s lots of competition and lots of choice, and when users are alert and don’t trust companies that don’t deserve their trust,” he ads. “But I can’t say I’ve ever seen that happen for any sustained period, but I still have hope it could happen someday.”
Call me a Pollyanna, but if Feedburner suddenly ceased to exist I don’t believe the world would end. Similarly, if Google suddenly started screwing with the service so much that it wasn’t as attractive as it is right now, I think life would go on. Since Feedburner really doesn’t HOST feeds per se (it only takes feed and attempts to improve them), without the service the feeds still exist. Granted, if the shift away from FB was sudden it would cause quite a bit of confusion with people scrambling to re-subscribe to new feed addresses, but the situation would right itself eventually.
The world wouldn’t end – but your podcast might be hosed.