FeedBurner’s slow agony, and Google as the dog in the manger
Google’s strategy in relation to blogs over the years has been at best strange, incoherent, and sometimes just plain stupid. One explanation, perhaps the most likely, emerged in light of the expiration of Google Reader in June 2013: it died because nobody in the company could be bothered to run it.
In February 2003, Google bought Blogger from a small startup called Pyra Labs, as a result of which I decided to start writing my first blog. There was much speculation at the time as to why Google had bought the company: blogs looked set to become a major source of content globally, generated by a new species of creatures that used simple tools and wrote about what interested them personally, something that Google was very interested in monitoring and indexing. But the reality was that Google, after making off with Blogger, proceeded to lock it in a room and throw away the key. Within a few months, WordPress was launched, and Blogger was all but forgotten.
Feedburner is another important tool for bloggers. Set up in 2004 by Dick Costolo, now the CEO of Twitter, it was bought by Google in June 2007 for $100 million, and pretty much followed Blogger’s fate. Feedburner is the tool that most blogs use to publish the RSS feeds: channeling a feed via FeedBurner means that its format can be read by any client, that it can be interpreted by a human being, that the writer can access statistics about it, and will be able to offer services such as online subscriptions to their articles.
All Google did after buying FeedBurner was to provide a few previously premium services for free, and then lock it in a room and throw away the key. After announcing in June 2011 that it was closing its API, followed by the closure of AdSense for feeds in September of 2012, FeedBurner joined the ranks of the undead, a lost soul doomed to wander the halls and corridors of the Googleplex.
More recently we have seen Google stop updating FeedBurner’s blog, its support forum, and even its Twitter account. The application is pretty much flying on autopilot: over the last 30 days, the number of subscribers that FeedBurner has reported for this page has been correct on just two occasions, which is quite simply unacceptable.
Of course there are alternatives to FeedBurner; fortunately: all the bloggers I know expect the application to close at any moment, and have come to regard Google as a modern-day dog in the manger: preventing others from having something that they themselves have no use for. It is hard to work out quite why Google would treat an application that is so important for so many people in this manner, but then the way it handled Google Reader made no sense either, unless you accept the widespread belief that Google simply failed to assign anybody to manage them, and nobody wanted to take the initiative.
Here’s the deal: blogs and bloggers are quite simply not important for Google: a blog written by just one writer has no chance of making it onto Google News, however influential he or she might be, or however relevant what they have to say might be. Does Google have a blog strategy? And if so, what lies behind its inconsistent behavior, other than to show that it is not a company to be trusted?
(En español, aquí)
