Sometimes burning is a good thing, for instance when making creme brulée, having a bonfire on the beach, or even better - burning your feeds with FeedBurner. Today Google announced the acquisition of FeedBurner. It's a deal that's been in the making for a while. Anyone who wondered why I was randomly in the Google Chicago office in the dead of winter this December will not be surprised at all that 'attending SES Chicago' was subterfuge for doing due diligence on FeedBurner with a team of folks from Google.
I've been a long-time fan of the people behind FeedBurner, in fact readers of this blog might remember I used to have a 'SpyOnIt' widget in the sidebar that would IM you when the page changed a few years ago. Dick Costolo, Steve Olechowski, Eric Lunt and Matt Shobe over at FeedBurner founded SpyOnIt before starting FeedBurner. They are all old friends and have built an amazing feed service.
FeedBurner originally began by solving the RSS or Atom issue that some feedreaders presented by only supporting one flavor. However support for all feed types is nearly ubiquitous now among feedreaders so they focused on bringing even more value and services to feeds. Some of their features include: in-feed advertising advertising, splicing photo feeds, link feeds and blog feeds into an uber-feed, providing excellent statistics and tracking for items read in feed readers as well as web analytics and much more that I'm not doing justice too. All in all I'm excited to have a passionate team aboard that has been innovating in the space that has built a great company and look forward to the enhancements they will bring to a number of areas of Google. Welcome aboard Burners!
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