I have often been criticized for criticizing FeedBurner, and while my position is in the minority the issues and concerns I have had over FeedBurner have changed over time. FeedBurner has been reactive in the past to community concerns so I would hope they continue to react as they have in the past.
One of my concerns early on where of RSS lock in, and when the community raised our voices over the lock in the folks at FeedBurner made changes so that people could leave if they wanted to which was a good thing.
My second concern revolved around the concern of a separate entity controlling ones your most valuable online assets. While they have the infrastructure of the Google complex to handle all of these feeds now. The issue goes beyond the handling of the feed, I have always contended that building my brand aka Geek News Central was more important than building feedburners brand. With Google making FeedBurner MyBrands free then every user of FeedBurner should be using it. Sadly most are not technically savvy enough to set it up or understand the importance.
My current contention revolves around the fact that you no longer own your own feed on FeedBurner, Google owns it and the rights around it. This means they can change anything the want and no one can say anything. While I am sure they will never change the content they can change elements within the RSS to better suit them and their properties. But at what point do they monetize the business they will want something in return for the use of the service.
One of the points Dave Winer is trying to make that people have largely ignored and cannot comprehend the consequences of Google making element changes within the RSS feeds and driving the RSS bus the way the want because they will have the law of gross tonnage on their side and most people are to ignorant to understand the ramifications.
Their are a large number of people that read this website and they do so via feed readers of all types. Less than 50% of the people reading this website do so through Google Reader. So if I were using FeedBurner which I don’t and Google made changes to the RSS then over 50% of you could be at risk of having a incompatible RSS application.
Google is in business to make money, and they do the majority of that through advertising. I have no doubt Google will try and push the locked RSS Specification. When and if they do we will be watching and we will see what the impact is down the road.
My reasoning may be in the minority but at least their are a few of us out here that are watching the space. Scripting.com