WordPress.com has retired its Feed Stats feature. While there might have been problems with it for some, I do find it a strange decision not to spend some time on it. After all, given the existence of Google Reader and its kind, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that more people read blogs with RSS readers than by going to the sites themselves. In fact, I peruse blogs more often with Google Reader than by visiting the websites themselves. It’s enough to make me wonder if I could use FeedBurner with this blog.
To follow on from this, I am beginning to wonder if that Automattic, the people behind WordPress.com, seems to be a quirky company that makes decisions that are questioned by its customers. After all, they did remove the post preview functionality from blog post editing screens and that has generated a good deal of comment. On self-hosted WordPress, you can add a plug-in to correct this but that option is not open to WordPress.com users. The answer that I got to a theme change request earlier this year adds to the impression as does seeing a company having staff apparently work from home all over the world.
Automattic seems an unconventional beast alright; could that lead to their undoing? It is king of the hill with blogging world for now but there is nothing to say that will last forever.
