Last week's rumored acquisition of Feedburner by Google has been confirmed. Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo announced the acquisition with his usual flare and humor proclaiming, "FeedBurner has been acquired by Google. The local weather forecast calls for general euphoria with intermittent periods of off-the-rails delight."
In a blog post, Google's VP of Product Management Susan Wojcicki said that Google aims "to give AdWords advertisers broader distribution to an even wider audience of users" and spoke glowingly of Feedburner's current RSS feed advertising platform. As we said last week, this marriage seems like a match made in heaven. Google already controls the most profitable text ad network on the Internet and will now have the opportunity to expand it into a large number of RSS feeds, giving them even more reach. They also gain access to a lot of statistical data about how people consume content.
I wanted to write about this yesterday, but the site was down for a couple of hours and I couldn't get to it. On Wednesday evening, blogger Niall Kennedy officially launched his new venture Startup Search, a directory of the web startup ecosystem -- companies, products, people, and investors.
Each company, product, person, or investor has their own page on Startup Search that includes general information, logo or photo, blog posts, a Flickr photostream, and Google Map. Evan Williams' page, for example, includes a quick bio, photo, contact information and map, head shot, and an overview of projects he is involved with (though oddly, it does not mention Twitter).
Infoworld magazine is reporting that Google is planning to integrate Adsense ads into their Google Maps service. The ads would be embedded into the push-pin popup graphics that are used to mark locations. Google does not know when these ads will go live.
Google also said that the ads could be integrated into their new Mapplets map mashup making service on a revenue sharing basis. Users would be paid by the click, similar to the current Adsense offerings, and could limit the number of sponsor ads that would appear in their Mapplets or turn them off completely. "This is something you will completely control," said Google engineer Andrew Eland at Google's Developer Day in London yesterday.
