I read rumors about the possible acquisition of FeedBurner by Google this week and now TechCrunch is announcing that they have confirmed this deal. It looks like Google is finishing up the DoubleClick acquisition before announcing their next acquisition.
For those of you wondering who FeedBurner is, they provide a service which used by a majority of bloggers to publish their RSS feeds. The orange feed icon you see here in ShanKri-la is provided by FeedBurner. It lets you track number of subscribers, serve ads and other cool things to RSS feeds.
I am sure this must be good news for FeedBurner. I for one am not sure if this is such a good thing. There is no doubt I admire a lot of Google’s products. But, FeedBurner has been kind of leading the pack in the RSS area and there is really no one big competitor so far. Competition usually is good for the customers that is me and you. If Google acquired FeedBurner, it could go either way. They might put all their muscle and resources and make it even better fast or could try to fit it into their landscape stifling faster innovation which FeedBurner might have been able to do it alone.
Having said that, I have faith in Google as they have a knack of making their acquisition into a better product. Google Earth, Picasa are just a couple of such products that I love. It makes perfect business sense for Google to serve up adds in RSS feeds as it is the de rigeur way to follow your favorite websites where the need to visit the website or view its ads becomes irrelevant. Plus, this might give them an edge in the Google Blog Search results as its purportedly take the number of subscribers to a site as one of the factors in their algorithms.
It will be interesting to see how all this unfolds in the near future.
