Last night Dave Winer penned something on the risk that Feedburner poses, especially now that it’s a part of Google. I didn’t think much of it. Winer is one of the original builders of Real Simple Syndication (RSS), basically what gives Feedburner its mojo. In all fairness, he has a right to say what he wishes pertaining to RSS right or wrong. Similarly, Fred Wilson, who invested in Feedburner, has a right to voice his opinion on just how bad and evil FB might be.
I’m not going to get into the intricacies of FB’s Terms of Use and what Google might do with the service. That would be a pretty boring post, what I’d like to draw attention to is the baffling expectation of Web folks (whoever that might be) to expect companies that buy assets to have very little right as to what they can and cannot do.
I know, I get it, so much of what has made the Web great has been the open source nature of things, the community of developers that created products and services, oftentimes for free. But just because a product or service is free does not mean the organization that offers it bears no value. That much we know: YouTube sold for $1.65B, Feedburner for $100M… incidentally, both to Google.
What I wonder is: why do we expect buyers of Web assets to behave in a greater altruistic manner than we would expect of traditional corporate entities? If Citigroup buys a bank, why should it have one set of implementation rules but Google another?
Maybe it’s because Google is getting too powerful. Well, we made it omnipresent, didn’t we?
I’ve covered this before, mainly from the angle that we seem to put Google through a higher standard than anyone else, but now I’m starting to think the vocal minority just needs to get with the program, when company A buys company B, they can do what they want with company B. If the mess up the secret recipe and its users flee, that’s the risk and self-correcting mechanism that ensures that company A takes care of company B’s users, clients, partners etc. But expecting company A to act in a way that we only expect web companies to act is unreasonable.
I can think of one thing to our company. On WatchMojo.com, we publish videos and do not run pre-rolls. We’ve had a few companies talk to us about potential buyouts. They naturally ask “we’ll be able to blast pre-rolls before all of your content on WatchMojo.com, right?” I hesitate, saying “well, why don’t we run ads, including pre-rolls, in our syndication network, but leave it ‘clean’ on WatchMojo.com?” Talks tend to break down at that point (I’m not saying I’ll never run pre-rolls… just not now, by the way). Anyway, say someone buys WatchMojo.com and they do 10 things to hurt the user experience, then shame on me, them… but someone else will come along and out-mojo WatchMojo.com. That’s the only thing that we should expect. But expecting a company to act like it’s a charity is starting to become foolish.
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