Technology Tales

Adventures in consumer and enterprise technology

A penchant for strange decisions?

Published on 14th June 2007 Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

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 numerous comments. 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? Though it is king of the hill with blogging world for now, there is nothing to say that will last forever.

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