Google and Preferential Treatment: Boo!
Google is poised to take over the world. But they seem to prefer doing it covertly. They want to take over the world by slowly buying up the services and software you use, and quietly assimilating all of these into their system so things work more seamlessly if you used them than not.
Take for example FeedBurner, which was recently bought by Google (probably for a gajillion dollars). It used to be that FeedBurner was platform agnostic—meaning it won’t give a damn if you used Blogger, WordPress, TypePad or any other blogging software, as long as you published an RSS feed. But now, if your blog is hosted by Blog*Spot, or published via Blogger, you would find it a tad easier to integrate FB into your blog.
If you host your content on a Blogger blog with a blogspot.com address (or use Blogger’s “custom domain” feature), you can now redirect your native Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed (quite easily, might we add). Gone are the muggy, languorous days of wrestling with “autodiscovery” tags in foreboding corners of your Blogger template code or hacking through this tangled discussion thread for a glimpse of configuration clarity. Starting right now, you just log into your Blogger account, select Settings | Site Feed, enter your FeedBurner feed address and click “Save Settings.” Zap! Pow! Kraaakkkk! Now you’ve got the complete picture of how your content is being consumed out here, out there, out everywhere.
I probably shouldn’t care, though, since I use self-hosted WordPress installations, anyway, and can always just use the FeedBurner redirect plugin to automatically redirect feed subscribers to FeedBurner. (Incidentally, that particular plugin is now maintained by FeedBurner officially.) But this sure is one advantage of Blogger over what is now its main competitor, WordPress.com. And I don’t think there’s a way for WP.com users to redirect their feed URL to their FeedBurner URL right now.
I guess WP.com should just install this plugin and make redirection an option easily accessible to everyone. This should be easy enough to do.
What do you think?