For everyone who subscribes to the FiveBoxes news update via email or RSS, we have a few important changes to inform you about. Currently, all of this is handled by a service known as FeedBurner. We signed up when FeedBurner was still an independent company, and we were happy with the service. In May of 2007, Google acquired FeedBurner for $100 million. With the current leadership at Google doing things that endanger the privacy of its users, we cannot in good faith and conscience continue to use any Google products.

As of September 1, we will be discontinuing our use of all Google services. This includes RSS and email subscriptions, Google Analytics, and all other things we used Google for.

For those of you with an email subscription, we will migrate your address over to our new self-hosted email service. You will not have to re-subscribe.

For those of you subscribing to FiveBoxes via RSS, you will need to manually update your feed link to this one: feed://www.fiveboxes.com/?feed=rss2

We also are making a few other changes around here as well:

• We’ll be focusing less effort on duplicating news and opinion you can get elsewhere, and more effort on in-depth well-researched articles and insightful op-eds.
• Instead of the Weekend Reader, we will be relying more on Twitter for this type of content. You can follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/fiveboxes, follow @fiveboxes with your Twitter client, check our homepage for our most recent tweets, or just wait for the weekly Twitter summary email.
• Our home page will be receiving a redesign to reflect our new focus.

If you have any requests or ideas on how we can make FiveBoxes serve you better, please contact us.

Thanks for your readership.