Feedburner's Migration to Google notice

I just attempted to log into my FeedBurner account and got the following notice (in addition to the login information):

NOTE: Service of FeedBurner publisher accounts will not be interrupted as a result of the acquisition by Google. You will have a 14-day interim period ending June 15, 2007 to opt-out of allowing Google to service your account. If you take no action by June 15, 2007, the rights to your data will transfer from FeedBurner to Google. Opting out will terminate your user agreement with FeedBurner, permanently delete your FeedBurner account, feeds, and all related statistical data and history, and prevent the transfer of your data rights to Google. To opt-out, contact us via accountx@feedburner.com, provide your FeedBurner account Username, and request to have your FeedBurner account deleted. We will contact you at your registered email address to confirm your deletion request before completing it.

While I don't object to the sale or to the company merging into the Google Borg, 14 days seems to be awfully short to give notice to those who don't want to continue using FeedBurner after it becomes part of Google. I have feeds which I ceased advertising years ago, which either return 301 redirects or 410 gone messages and they still get tens of hits per day. If you delete your FeedBurner account you can't redirect the subscribers using that account (unless you either redirect using a 302 or 307 redirect from a URL you control, or you used the feeds.yoursitename.tld service, which you could simply point back to a site you control). With summer vacations and the vagaries of feed updates my guess is that many people or organizations who do opt-out of the FeedBurner-Google migration will lose many readers, who will just get dropped.

FeedBurner should allow, for a limited time, say 60 days, the ability to opt-out in some way and redirect the feed elsewhere.

An interesting exercise would be to track the people who drop their FeedBurner feeds (and accounts), picking out the feeds with the highest traffic volume and registering them for yourself (unless FB has changed to blocking re-registration of a feed URL).

Posted in Observations