Google to Buy Feedburner for $100M

Feedburner, one of the most useful and valuable free Web services in my experience, is now part of the big Goog, where, one can only hope they dedicate at least as much energy to the service side of this product as they naturally would to innovating it.

Feedburner launched in Chicago in 2004 and quickly became the premier RSS feed-burner for blogs and even newspaper Web sites. I’ve published dozens of feeds for a variety of projects using their tool and have also used Feedburner to publish media-rich RSS podcast feeds.

This deal is all-but officially announced, and is rumored to be an all-cash acquisition.

Google may be able to boost Feedburner’s struggling publisher’s ad network, but my main concern again here is Google’s imperfect track record in keeping these ma & pa startups alive (of course, Dodgeball wasn’t nearly as established as Feedburner is when it was purchased).