Firstly, I want praise for not using 'GOOGLE IS EVIL!!' as the title of this thread.
There, now that that's out of the way...
We have
here and
here two identical RSS feeds, yes? One is the source feed from TechCrunch's Wordpress, the other is that very same feed proxied through Google's recent Feedburner acquisition which happens to be the only feed that TechCrunch themselves link to.
Now I understand people using Google
services when Google gets to mine the user's data/behavior in return. I have a personal objection to it, but if people are willing to expose themselves like that then it's on their back. But exactly what benefit does the
user receive when retrieving feeds from Google's proxy as opposed to getting them directly from the source site?
I fully acknowledge that the provider of said service benefits from using this service, but it's not the provider's behavior Google gets to mine. It deeply concerns me that in this case Google has, in my opinion, moved from providing services that entice users, to
providing services that entice providers into forcing users to use said services.
I'm going to stop short of claiming Google is evil in this case simply because I can't imagine I'm not missing something here. I would really appreciate some insight into what the F is going on here.
Ehtyar.
