Feedburner Acquired for $100 Million by Google - Maybe

There has been rumours going round for the last couple of weeks that Goolge have been in talks with feedburner to acquire them for $100 Million. The main source of these rumours: Sam Sethi

For those of you who don’t know feedburner is a Feed Management Tool, whereby your feed can be converted into html, add footers to each post, reduce to only summaries and probably the most useful tool tracking.

So why would Google want to add this type of service to their portfolio, well the majority of clued up people now use Feed management reader (like Google Readerto read new blog entries and articles, bypassing the site completely and therefore any of the ads on the site. I put forth the idea (and a lot of people agree) that if Feedburner where to become “Google Feedburner” then we would see a system that integrated Google Adwords in your blog feeds and Google Analytics to view the stats.

Again if you really think about it, Google is all about gathering information, whether found on webpages, visitor stats (Google Analytics), user interaction in the web (advanced features on Google Toolbar) and now with all personal information. Only today did I come across The Independent (A UK national broadsheet newspaper - A bit preachy) splashed across the whole of their front page “Google is watching you”.

Google are " setting out to create the most comprehensive database of personal information ever assembled, one with the ability to tell people how to run their lives." - but a completely separate matter.

So if this rumour is at all true I think that Google acquisition of Feedburner primarily to be able to gather more information and track trends more efficiently; will they integrate this additional information into Analytics, who knows?

Obviously the additional advertsing review will also come in handy.

Wouldn’t everyone be surprised if Yahoo! or MSN came along a snatched it up quickly?