Feedburner Googled

I’d realllllly like the stuff I use to stop getting bought by big companies, I don’t need to be giving my feed stats to the big G. For those keeping track, if you use a lot of Google products, you (they) might now have in one place; your email, your blog content, your blog stats, your blog feed readership stats, your written documents, your spreadsheets, the groups you interact with, the chats you have, your search and reading history, which feeds you read. And when I say “you” it might also be the group you are organizing, the company you are running or preparing to launch.

It’s not only a question of wetter the company itself has nefarious purposes in mind, it’s also a question of accessibility, which employee using his 20% free time to dive into that info and do whatever with it? Which hacker can grab huge chunks of your life in one convenient place? Or a disgruntled employee selling swaths of user info?

It’s been coming for a while and Karl has been (or was) on the case for a looong time so props to him but what’s bugging me more now is that with them (or Yahoo, or Microsoft) buying apps left and right, you can’t even keep away from them by going with independents because 4-5-6 months later they’re gobbled up. Can’t really blame the founders for cashing in but I wish there were more buyers and less centralization. Would also be nice to see decentralized open source solutions.