Avoid rash decisions to quit online platforms

Beware the knee-jerk: Why it’s a bad idea to swear off Instagram, Feedburner, and other services because of a bump in the virtual road.

It seems a lot of people, including several friends, have made rash decisions to quit services lately, and I’m not certain these were the right calls. They weren’t for me, anyway. For example:

Feedburner

Feedburner is a common tool for setting up RSS feeds for blogs and other websites. The basic tool is simple, though there have always been possibilities for more, especially in terms of analytics. (Let’s not get started on the failure of Google, which bought Feedburner a few years back, to integrate these analytics with the Google Analytics tool, but that does play in to the general frustration.)

Late in 2012, things started to happen—or, rather, they stopped happening. The @Feedburner Twitter feed was turned off, and the separate Feedburner blog was put to rest. Surely signs of the apocalypse, no?

No. The core tool continues to work. There was a brief outage of the Feedburner user dashboard that gave many of us agita, but the feeds, by and large, worked well.

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