Dave’s real concern about FeedBurner having been laid bare, he has written a new post to try to pave it over.
The whole thing is predicated on logic so poor that it demonstrates either abject stupidity or extreme disingenuousness. I don’t think Dave is stupid, so I have to assume he’s deliberately trying to muddy the waters here. (The third option, I guess, is that he’s so blinded by his dislike for Google that he’s highly paranoid)
He claims that he’s worried about “tying” FeedBurner feeds to Google Reader. The argument is “Google could make it so that google reader only accepts feedburner feeds!” Sure, they could. And they would almost instantly lose their membership on Google Reader to a different feed reader. I’d export my feeds and head right back to FeedDemon the minute that happened. So would a lot of other people. And that’s assuming that Google would even do that. To try to support this argument, Dave provides the following:
It could end up meaning “doesn’t work at all.” It’s quite possible in the second or third iteration that Google drops support for non-Feedburner feeds. It wouldn’t be unprecedented, far from it. Google Blogoscoped created a long list of Google products that “prefer” other Google products. I’ve never seen Google not do this when they had the chance. The instant they bought Blogger they tied it to their toolbar. If they had used an open API the toolbar would have worked with all blogging tools. Google just doesn’t think that way, sorry to say.
They “tied” Blogger to their Toolbar. By “tied” he means “added some features to toolbar that work well wtih blogger.” The Toolbar is not required to use Blogger. Having a blogger blog is not required to get the Toolbar. So these two things are not even “tied” in any real sense of the word. Let’s assume, arguendo, that they are.
Google didn’t make other things work worse with the toolbar. They didn’t make Blogger work worse with other external blogging tools. Speaking in economic terms, they didn’t reduce anyone’s utility. All they did was add utility to a certain pairing of services.
This is totally different from making Google Reader only work for FeedBurner feeds, which would clearly reduce the utility of Reader’s users.
So his example is worthless and his logic is flawed beyond repair.
The only thing left is paranoid FUD: “OMG! They could break everything!!1″
…doesn’t the OPML Editor have an “auto update” feature? Couldn’t Dave send down an update to delete all of the data of people who speak positively or Google? Or negatively of him?
Shouldn’t we be rallying against that?