Feedburner Acquired by Google

According to Techcrunch the rumor that Google is buying Feedburner is now official. Until Google or Feedburner posts it, it’s still a rumor to me! But considering the source it looks like this deal is going through in the next 2-3 weeks. I’ve already seen talk about people wanting to leave just because Google is buying them, though I’m not sure why. When did Google buying a company become such a bad thing?

I don’t think too much will change with the Feedburner service. Google tried to start their own feed advertising program and it fizzled pretty quickly. This is likely an attempt by Google to try and get back into that market. Feedburner also offers CPM based ads which is another good fit for Google who has been expanding their ads in that area lately. Hopefully this won’t mean they’ll replace the CPM ads with the Adsense contextual ads that seem to be doing worse and worse for many publishers.

The other features Feedburner offers, like publishing your RSS feeds and providing usage statistics is another perfect fit for Google. They gain access to all those feeds which will I’m sure will be used on their blog search, among other things. Google may even be able to provide some even better reporting through their Analytics program (previously Urchin).

What do you think Google buying Feedburner means for the future of the service?