With FeedBurner, Google Takes the Measure of the Web

Google (GOOG) has bought FeedBurner, in a move that hits close to home for Beta. Why? Well, I'm a customer of both, using Google Analytics to track our blog networks' traffic and FeedBurner to manage our RSS feeds.

Dick Costolo, FeedBurner's CEO, had a key insight three years ago: RSS feeds are a new medium, different from the Web. "The new medium never drives dollars to the old; it drives dollars to the new thing," he told Business 2.0 last year. And sure enough: Look at all those dollars the Google truck just drove to FeedBurner.

The deal, valued at a rumored $100 million - a figure the companies have yet to confirm or deny - has been cast as all about advertising. FeedBurner sells ads that appear in RSS feeds, a Web delivery mechanism used by blog and news sites to deliver headlines, summaries, and sometimes the entire text of articles and posts.

But I think there's more to the deal - and to FeedBurner - than that.

FeedBurner doesn't just distribute feeds; it enhances them and recombines them in several ways. Business 2.0, for example, uses FeedBurner to power a feature called "The Spew," where all of the B2 blogs' posts are mixed together into a continuous, real-time feed. Today, one big thing that FeedBurner does is splice in ads to feeds, but I could see it doing a lot more. Imagine, for example, Google using its search technology to splice in related videos, Web pages, and blog posts into a feed.

And FeedBurner also fits with another Google product, Google Analytics. FeedBurner recently expanded from tracking RSS feed activity to tracking Web-page traffic, too, with the acquisition of another startup called Blogbeat. Folding Blogbeat into Google Analytics, which Google recently revamped, could make that traffic-tracking tool even more useful. By adding RSS traffic into the media types Google tracks, FeedBurner will let bloggers and other publishers will get a better picture of how their readers are consuming their content.

For those concerned about Google's growing domination, its entry into the RSS-feed business may be cause for alarm. But I imagine most publishers and advertisers will see this as a positive - one vendor to deal with and integrate into their websites, where there used to be two.

What do you think? Does this move give Google too much power over bloggers?