On FeedBurner and Free Services–Don’t get irate when they quit
Mar 1st, 2007 by Kirk M
I was banging around my usual virtual haunts that I usually bang around during the workweek (less work and more weak this week unfortunately) and looked at the clock on the wall and figured it might be nice to pound out a short post before I retire. Just a sort of round up, thought of day as it were.
So let’s see here…
FeedBurner was back up and running normaly by the time I checked my feeds at lunch. The statistics had been accumulating all along, just not being displayed on the site as they usually do. I had a bit of a surprise though when I checked my comments feed and saw that Eric Olsen of FeedBurner had left a comment my previous post stating that all was in hand (this was around 10:35 am according to the comment) and that things should be showing up normally soon. Now I don’t know about you folks but that’s a real nice touch since I’m sure that Eric had plenty of other business to attend to today yet he took the time out to hunt down my backwoods type blog and leave a short “how-do-you-do” on my post. Definitely no complaints there.
Now this brings a question to my feeble little mind. Why is it that there are always certain people that seem to feel they have a right to get mad at an organization that offers a quality free service like the site metrics that FeedBurner provides, when a small glitch shows up and throws wrench into the works, stopping the free service for a short time? All the virtual YELLING and COMPLAINING that goes on is truly amazing. The indignation and affronted-ness flying around the forums as if these people were actually paying FeedBurner for their free service. Sure, there are a few that pay for the ProStats version but these weren’t the ones doing the complaining.
Alright, I understand that if a company or an organization like FeedBurner, Wordpress, Google or any of the others that provide quality services or software for no charge to the user should at least make the effort to put some reliability into it or should not bother offering it in the first place. Let’s face it, these folks that are providing all this wonderful free stuff are making money somehow but as far as those (like you and me) who make use of these free services are concerned, we ain’t the ones paying them that money so when that glitch does come around and things stop working for awhile (and it will, I guarantee it), drop a [polite] note to them about it and as for the rest of it…keep your fingers off the CAPS LOCK, hush up and let ‘em fix it.
In the meantime…have a nice evening all. 
