Google is now after FeedBurner

By Vivek | May 18th, 2007 at 12:14 pm ET         

Oh man! Deals are flying all around in the web20 space. Newest rumor is that Google is planning to acquire FeedBurner. The deal would make perfect sense for Google since even if the search giant tries, it can never overcome FeedBurner factor- thanks to the url-encoding of our feeds. This deal would result in giving Google access to millions of higher valued pageviews everyday for publish ads on, something Microsoft would really miss out on.

While I would have loved to see FeedBurner stay on, but as of now it looks like the time is up. This is just another pointer that proves Google is going to stifle whoever tries to rise up by buying out the top players. Are we as product creators and entrepreneurs afraid of Google? Yes a bit, but in the larger sense of those words, not much. I think this would just result in smarter people exiting the existing markets to work on products that create new markets and capture the imagination of people forcing Google to fall back or shell out much more then it can imagine paying out.

Coming back to FeedBurner, how much can the deal be worth? I would guess around $1 billion. Any other guesses?