Lots of conversation around the place about Dave Winer’s post (now two) on “why Feedburner’s in trouble” — Feedburner is a service that manages your feeds in various innovative ways, but not before it swallows your URL into its own.

At first glance it seems that everybody is now using FB. We at Syntagma are not, although I did adopt it for six months a couple of years ago. What put me off was the thought that if China, say, barred the Feedburner domain, as they’re apt to do, you would be blocked too, along with millions (?) of other sites. The words “eggs” and “basket” spring unbidden to the mind.

The stats provision was great, mind you, and they also handle advertising in the feeds. It’s become a pretty comprehensive service, which I believe is still free for most users.

So, why don’t we just bite the bullet and sign up with FB? First, a little philosophy.

As far as software goes, I’m not one of those chaps who’s constantly on the lookout for small incremental improvements in performance from shiny new apps. I use Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer because almost everything else in the business environment is compatible. They are about as universal as it gets offline and on and allow me to relax about most things while getting on with the toil of earning a living.

So why not Feedburner?

One, it’s so ruddy intricate and adds yet another raft of complexity and layers of choice to an already over-engineered online world. I recoil from its sheer brilliance. If it paid me $10,000 a month, I probably would consider it — it would be worth the hassle. But I know it won’t, so I don’t.

Dave’s point that new owner, Google (no less), may tie the product to its Google Reader and other apps, is another point of contention. Lazily, I’m still on Bloglines, although I do have Reader set up — it’s rarely used for the same reason I don’t use Newsgator any more. Bloglines fulfils my simple needs and, by and large, performs well. Why chop and change for the sake of it?

So now someone at Google “owns” Feedburner and all their feeds. And they could, if they wanted to, change the feeds to another format, overnight, without asking anyone.

We should always remember that the people who come to the internet to spend money and swot up on a topic are not geeks and students at Stanford. They are ordinary folk who don’t want all that complexity, but a simple user interface that intuitively guides them seamlessly to what they want.

That’s what “the next billion users” need. Let’s not forget them.