Things change when a large, publicly traded company acquires a smaller firm. Google’s $100 million pickup of Feedburner has elicited some negative speculation.
Feedburner Fears After Google’s Grab
The purchase of Feedburner by Google presents an interesting scenario for the growth of RSS feedreading adoption. It’s been our opinion that such adoption will get a boost from Microsoft, which has built RSS feed technology into its newest builds of Outlook, Internet Explorer, and Vista.
Feedburner makes feeds easier for the common Internet surfer to use. Microsoft’s products will encourage a lot of people to subscribe to feeds. Google’s acquisition lets them see all of the Feedburner subscriptions have, whether through a Microsoft product or any other reader.
With Microsoft putting feedreading into the hands of millions of computer users, Google just has to encourage feed publishers to use Feedburner, already an outstanding product.
See what just happened there? As Todd Cochrane noted at Geek News Central, this is one more step toward Google closing the loop and knowing a lot more about people than they may realize:
Google has been trying to close the loop for a long time and while this purchase is smart for them, they are now going to know more about some people than their own family members may. They are going to be able to share that data, cross correlate and target you on so many levels that if you look at what they are collecting already is pretty damn scary.
Amit Agarwal lamented the purchase, as it likely means the end of the Feedburner Advertising Network. He hopes Google stays away from other ad options:
While Adsense is a successful program, you still need to diversify the revenue streams – depending only on one player sounds bit of a risk even when that player is Google. What advertising choices would be left for small website publishers, other than Adsense, if Google expresses interest in other popular blog advertising networks like Adify, BlogAds or Tribalfusion?
The choice could be Google, Google, or more Google if that happens.
