Following last year when Google arbitrarily ditched email notification from Youtube, they have now notified that the Feedburner service will be changed, and in their words, “we will be turning down most non-core feed management features, including email subscriptions, at that time”.
So as we read it, Google has summarily decided that email subscriptions are non-core feed management features, and is therefore discontinuing them, without any consultation of their user base. It is an arbitrary decision made by Google to enable them to increase their profit margins.
Of course this is an excellent reason not to put any faith in Google or any of these mega multi national internet corporations, as the fact they are creaming gigantic amounts of wealth from these free internet platforms means nothing. They are alway looking for ways to cut costs so they can keep creaming every greater amounts of income.
As I have always understood it, Feedburner email subscriptions are in fact one of the core Feedburner features. I have absolutely no idea what else people can get from a Feedburner subscription that doesn’t involve email. Google is basically making their services harder for a lot of people to use by continually cutting email options out of them because email is the service that the most people find easy to use understand. It is far easier to set someone who is less computer literate up with a email based subscription than using RSS or a web page that they have to remember to click on regularly to read stuff in.
For me once again it is a preferred choice to move as much of my stuff as I can off Google’s platforms, and get out of supporting their ecosystem.