It's Official, Google Buys FeedBurner

After a week of speculation and rumor, FeedBurner announced on Friday it had agreed to be acquired by Google. FeedBurner is a privately-held Chicago company that syndicates more than 700,000 bloggers and podcasters.

Neither company issued a press release. Instead, they did it the Web 2.0 way: it was announced in blog postings. Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google  announced the deal in the Official Google blog while FeedBurner co-founder and CEO Dick Costolo did the same with a blog posting entitled It's True-gle!.

Terms of the purchase were not disclosed. A Reuters report estimated the price at around $100 million.

Wojcicki said FeedBurner will continue operating as it has been doing, so new customers may sign up and existing customers will not be interrupted. In the mean time, the two companies expect to integrate their services, combining FeedBurner's content with Google's ads and analytics.

Costolo listed a number of possibilities for the merger, starting with "Google's competencies and focus around publisher analytics, distribution, and monetization" which he said "map perfectly to our suite of services."

Costolo also mentioned providing a single dashboard and source for metrics for providing feedback to publishers, something Google can definitely bring to the table.

"We like our chances. We are confident that we are going to be a part of the company that can best deliver the most comprehensive suite of services to publishers. We are confident that we're going to continue to have fun and innovate for customers as rapidly as possible. We are confident and hopeful that you'll look at your feed dashboard soon and say to yourself 'Well, *that* was a good idea!'" he wrote.