How the hell did I miss the upcoming shutdown of FeedBurner? Another lesson in lock-in.

#“How the hell did I miss the upcoming shutdown of FeedBurner? Another lesson in lock-in.”

How the hell did I miss the fact that Google is shutting down FeedBurner in October?

I always remember Dave Winer warning all us bloggers back in 2007 that we were nuts to insert a single company between us and our readers.Most of us thought he was being a crank. It turns out he was right.

My big worry is that we will all lose all of our Blog Subscribers. In my case, built up over 11 years. I’ll be optimistic and assume some sort of skeleton FeedBurner service will exist which will 301 re-direct all the feeds to the original sources.

Great round-up piece on the problem by Neville Hobson. Two solutions offered by Dave.

How many times are we going to fall for this before we learn? We see a service that offers us some really nice benefits for free (FeedBurner, Facebook , Twitter, etc etc). Then we choose to ignore what will happen if they go away or change the rules or just break. We decide lock-in is a fair swap for free. Then they go away or change the rules or just break. And we’re left high and dry, swearing never again. Until the next time.

Luckily I’ve only got two blogs left using FeedBurner. Unluckily they are the two most trafficked. I’ll see if I can do the CNAME transition before D-Day and report back.

UPDATE: Someone left a comment on Google+ saying that it is just specific APIs that are getting shutdown, not the overall service. If I can confirm that, I’ll report back. Meanwhile, I’m still going to make the CNAME move.