Feedburner Sale to Google Confirmed

Techdirt is reporting that the rumored sale of Feedburner to Google has been confirmed. "Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years."

Re:Why bother?

[drinkypoo]

I think they're just stamping out competition. And they don't have to keep doing it forever, either. They buy one or two more of 'em and people will stop starting them. When Google has the top three of whatever, people will mostly stop making whatever. The procedure worked for Microsoft time and time again, why not Google? :)

Not Good

[Jack Action]

I use Feedburner heavily for various blogs and podcasts; and if you asked me a year ago about the Google take-over, I would have said great (or, who cares?).

But since then I've seen too many half-assed Google projects (especially around rss feeds: the Google reader for example is terrible compared to a competitor like Bloglines). Google recently redid the presentation of the statistics service they aquired (Google Analytics), making it worse. Feedburner is currently a great service that is intuitive, innovative and easy to use. But when Google gets through with it, I fear it too be half-assed.

As it has no doubt been said by others, Google is shaping up to be another Microsoft: using its dominance in one area (search), to force consumers into using inferior products. Google is doing it though by "killing with kindness" -- buying up the innovators and strangling them, rather then Microsoft's heavy tactics.

am I the only one

[sentientbrendan]

who doesn't see what the big deal is with RSS feeds? Or doesn't see why they need to be included in every little application (like safari, firefox, thunderbird, etc).

Usually when I am *online* and want to look at the news from a site... I don't grab their RSS feed, I just go to their site...

It seems like an okay way of exchanging information between different sites in a very limited fashion, but that doesn't make it important or worth spending a lot of money on. It's just one more xml schema for doing something really simple... I don't understand the hype.

Traffic = Data?

[MenTaLguY]

It's the only thing I can think of.

Re:All style, little substance

[charlesnw]

I couldn't agree more. Google has produced NOTHING else of any substance beyond search. And even then the search isn't all that great. The algorithim isn't even all that inovative and is implemented by many search engines.

Re:VCs have changed?

[davidu]

I've never heard of a VC say they expect a 100x return. Not in your wildest dreams. Maybe if the amount of total investment is like under $50,000 could I see that expectation.

Sequoia Capital is one of the best in the business and they have had 5 exits, maybe 10 at most, that were over a billion dollars.

10x is nothing to sneeze at. 20x is great. 50x is fantastic. 100x is abnormally impressive.

-david

Re:All style, little substance

[aussie_a]

There is nothing technologically shattering or innovative about YouTube, so it speaks to volumes that Google paid such a large amount of money to acquire it.

Yes, it says Google with all of their name power, is still willing to buy others with name power.