Google does it again. FeedBurner has been picked up for a cool $100 mill. Not too shabby. Congrats to all the folks at FeedBurner, you build a service that we’ve all come to rely on and made it awesome. So awesome that a powerhouse like Google saw it as something it needed to acquire to achieve its strategic goals.
There is, of course, a ton of discussion about the purchase. Techcrunch broke the news, Tony Hung had some of the first real analysis. Mathew Ingram and Marshall Kirpatrick have more thoughts, though Andy Beard did have some sage words it was still a rumour.
BuisnessWeek, GeekNewsCentral, and apparently Nick Wilson (via Twitter) think this is a bad thing for all of us.
For me it’s not the potential for increased revenue from Feedvertising (Disclosure: My personal blog uses FeedBurner’s RSS ads), but the potential for integrating my RSS feed with other Google services, especially Google Analytics. Essentially my favourite metrics tools are now under one roof, and I really like that. I use FB’s RSS stats for readership and FB’s web stats for live reporting. When I want to drill down and export reports, it’s Google Analytics all the way.
Yes, the FOG (fear of Google) is palpable right now. Google pulling all our data together. What will they do with all the information. I think it’s pretty clear what they will do with it. All this data is going to be used to deliver more targeted ads to use. Don’t forget that Google is the keeper of much of our data that we want to search for. Don’t you think that maybe blogs and other sites using FB’s services might get preferential treatment by Google for indexing? Maybe sites using Google Analytics and FB might skip the whole sandbox entirely? Might be nice.
Yeah, I think this is a good thing. And, probably just the first of many acquisitions we’ll be seeing this summer. Wonder how long 37 Signals is going to remain on it’s own? Wouldn’t that be a nice addition to Google Apps?
