Since Google had shut down their Google Reader app there are now countless speculations on what lies next on their hit list. Perhaps it is Feedburner, itself a former acquisition, an app that powers RSS delivery and analytics for many blogs across the Web, including mine.

In practice, free products end up working as traps, both for the creator and the consumer. The absence of a price tag attracts many more users than the provider can profitably sustain, and while on the face of it the large user base appears as an indicator of health, behind the scenes it is an ever growing cost center, requiring more resources and maintenance time by the day. When the venture is inevitably shut down, the user base reacts in anger because to those users you appear to be taking away something they thought they had, a product they had the perception of owning.

Dmitry Fadeyev.