congrats to google on feedburner
I’m incredibly happy for Dick, Eric, Steve, Matt, Don and the rest of the folks at FeedBurner…and congratulations are definitely in order for the corpdev team at Google, who with the acquisition signal both the strategic importance of RSS to Google, and the extraordinary talent of the nice midwestern team who in three short years defined the state of the art in syndication services for publishers large and small.
I’ve known Dick and Eric for nearly ten years now – I first met met the pair when Mr. Lunt and I were on the advisory board for a Miller Freeman Web 1.0 conference – and I’m proud of being even marginally affiliated with the company and services they’ve built. I gave them a little bit of advice over beers when they were leaving the Spyonit technology in the hands of 724 Solutions and thinking about what would come next…I don’t quite remember what I said, but I’m fairly certain they rightly ignored whatever I told them. And then nearly two years later, after I had landed at Six Apart, it was a natural fit to help make it easy for TypePad users to burn their feeds and flare their blogs…because by that point some crazy number of our customers were so in love with the FeedBurner service that they were doing it the hard way themselves.
Like Anil, I’m a bit concerned about Google’s gravitational pull on talent (I mean seriously – Veen and Norton and Costolo and Lunt under one corporate umbrella? The mind reels…), but I’ll worry about that on Monday. In the meantime, I’m hoping there are some nice meals being planned in Chicago.