Lots of chatter about the usefulness and relevance of FeedBurner since the Google acquisition ¹. Chris Baskind formalizes it by updating the reasons not to use Feedburner to cache your feeds.

“FeedBurner is showing its age. While Google has ignored its new baby, technology has been steaming ahead.” – Chris Baskind

Baskind’s analysis is more publisher-oriented than my reader-oriented and parser-oriented issues with the service; Part 1, Part 2.

On the flip side, I give FeedBurner kudos for their focus and going deep on single, specific, simple, offering.

1. Hopefully, conventional wisdom about being acquired by Google will soon/now be equated to completely shutting a service down. AppEngine, if anything, is a thin lifeline to a not-customers of acquired services.

The more work I do parsing and aggregating feeds, the more annoyed I am with Google’s Feedburner published feeds (part 1).

As you know, I don’t see the need for Feedburner and believe their useful services (metrics, being smart about enclosures and tags, etc) is more effectively done within the weblog/publishing software¹ for 99% of the feeds they serve.

Looking at iTunes, Feedburner, and Twitter feeds, you’d think it was called RHS, not RSS.

Chances are, if you’re reading this, your weblog could publish the same feed Feedburner does with far less complexity and provide you with the same value.

For a more strategic view: Google’s Feedburner is Trouble – Dave Winer

Later:
In the comments, Luke posits another point of value. But, I don’t have to pay for people reading my Amazon book reviews either.

1. Or a stats program that understands both pageviews and file downloads. These numbers aren’t big enough to have useful value anyway. Just not enough 0s to pitch to advertisers.

My 2 most recent pet peeves:

1. Permalinks that are actually Feedburner redirects.
2. Feed links that are actually Feedburner landing pages

Anyone else or just me?

LATER:
Some elaboration as requested by Jake Parrillo from the Publisher Services Team:

Jake,

Thanks for the note.

To start, I use NetNewsWire as my aggregator.

By redirects, I mean the tag of an item being a Feedburner link redirecting to, rather than being, the item’s permalink. When I’m quoting and linking to the item, I want the actual permalink. Today, to get it, I need to load the Feedburner link into a browser and wait for the redirect, then grab the permalink. Artificially inflating pageviews and generally slowing me down.

Yes, by ‘landing page’, I was referring to the “Browser Friendly” pages. When I clicked the feed link, I expected the feed url to be passed to NetNewsWire. With the “Browser Friendly” pages; I need to first realize that I need to take an action, then make a selection, then the url gets added to NNW. Again, slowing me down and not what I expect to occur.