I love Google and I have several very close friends working for them. But there is one aspect of Google that is irritating: they phase out things without putting an effective transition plan in place, and often without offering any replacement. They did this with Reader (I haven’t forgiven them for it), they did this with Picasa (though they did replace Picasa’s web-version with Google Photos in a painful process), and FeedBurner, if people are to be believed, is surely on the chopping block.
Remember Feedburner? If you don’t, I don’t blame you. The service was a rage in the previous decade, but Google has let it slide into a slow and painful obscurity. Probably the only reason Google still has it alive is that this is a customer-to-customer service that they cannot terminate (as opposed to Reader or Picasa, which were Google-to-Customer). In any case, bugs in FeedBurner have not been fixed since 2012, and no new features have been added since 2010.
As it happens though, this site has used FeedBurner for a while now. But wary of being left out to dry I took the plunge and moved to MailChimp. If you are an “Active” subscriber to this site I have migrated you over to the new email-subscription service. You should almost certainly be receiving this post via MailChimp on 27th August. I have deactivated the FeedBurner link, but if you still receive a second email from the old service, please let me know and I will look into it.
It would appear that I received an e-mail from the old Google/Feedburner service and NOT from MailChimp. How can I get on the MailChimp list?
Well, MailChimp figured I was spamming the site subscribers and “disabled” my account. Go figure!
And somehow FeedBurner is still polling my site. In any case, until MailChimp gets back in touch with me, I will leave things as they are. I had gone to MailChimp expecting good service, but not only did they disable my account without any explanation, they also have not responded to my ticket 72 hours after I opened it.