The companies he found and sold off included Burning Door Networked Media which sold to DKA LLC.  And then he co-founded Spyonit.com which sold to 724 Solutions.  Finally he co-founded Feedburner which sold to Google for $100 million.  Perhaps Costolo wants to go for a fourth.

Feedburner was based in Chicago when it first started out.  After being acquired, the employees of Feedburner worked on several other projects within Google such as advertisements.  The Feedburner service and user base was rolled into Google’s own RSS system.  When working at Google, Costolo reported to Neal Mohan.

[via TechCrunch]

Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb wrote a lengthy piece about how Feedburner may not be hearing your pings.  Its getting to be such a serious problem that bloggers and other news agencies may look into alternatives.  FeedBlitz decided to take advantage of the Google-Feedburner situation.

Earlier this week the company announced that they have opened a brand new RSS management service to the public.  The service was previously in private beta.  The FeedBlitz RSS management system has better branding for RSS feeds, a one stop social media marketing solution, smarter SEO, better metrics, and control over content and viral marketing.

“You’ll see that the FeedBlitz RSS feed service will rapidly evolve over the coming weeks as we learn more about its real-world behavior, what we inspire you (with luck!) to ask for, and what we could do better at. There are more features we have in the queue to add, and we’ve had some great suggestions already from the private beta that we’ll be implementing,” stated Phil Hollows founder of FeedBlitz on the company blog.

One of the advantages of using FeedBlitz immediately is the real-time reports and analytics functionalities.  Feedburner generally waits until each morning to deliver the previous days analytics. Eventually I’ll switch Pulse2.com to FeedBlitz to see if the switch is worth it and will report my experiences.

Until then, if I were Google they should use this as a wake up call.

The new service is available [here]

“At the first Next Web conference, Michael Arrington said he didn’t pay attention to pageviews anymore. For him, it was all about RSS readers. Back then, RSS had just became popular. That was a real eye-opener. From that day on, I have been trying to increase the number of RSS readers on my blogs,” stated Boris ”But recently, I asked my (editors note: 1449) Twitter followers why some of them hadn’t subscribed to the Next Web Blog RSS feed. I got a lot of replies from people, most of them saying they were happy enough with the blog’s Twitter feed. That was another eye-opener for me.”

Given the cultural obsession wrapped around the Twitter culture, I can imagine how fast TwitterCounter will grow quickly.  But from what I learned, placing the same company name of the service that a company depends on is not a smart move.  Alexaholic is an example.  The actual design of TwitterCounter.com looks too similar to Twitter also, it needs a fix.

A feature I like about TwitterCounter is that it tracks follower growth over the course of a week.  This allows Twitter users to monitor how interesting their mini-blog posts and messages on Twitter.

Below is a sample of what TwitterCounter looks like for my Twitter profile:

Information Source:
[1] TheNextWeb.org: Twittercounter: Feedburner for Twitter by Ernst-Jan Pfauth

One of the reasons why I respect Cashmore for bringing this issue to the public is because Mashable.com is considered a top blog and they have gained credibility by the number of RSS subscribers they have. Whereas, many smaller blogs that have quality content struggle to increase the number of their RSS subscribers, only to be shadowed by bigger blogs who have struck deals or have a close relationship with those who design RSS homepages.

Mashable.com has roughly 121,000 RSS subscribers based on Feedburner statistics. Pete Cashmore followed up by saying:

At Mashable we know this topic very well: back in late 2006, we got ourselves a default feed on the Pageflakes homepage, resulting in a huge boost for our subscriber numbers – 300K+ at one point. Except that if you visited Pageflakes once and never came back, you were still counted as a subscriber. Pageflakes eventually made changes to correct this overcount, but people were unlikely to trust our Feedburner count after that. And yet the issue continues to affect other blogs.”

By exploiting some of the measuring tactics used by RSS analytic companies, Cashmore is essentially flattening the playing field for beginner bloggers such as myself. Whether these RSS companies react to Cashmore’s findings… its a matter of ethics (see [1] below for further discussion, including a rebuttal from Feedburner).

The Internet has a long way to go before accurate data can be measured. For example: Why does LifeHacker have a lower Alexa ranking than TechCrunch even though they get more hits? I know this because TechCrunch’s SiteMeter also used to be public as of a few months ago and there was a significant difference in hits against LifeHacker.

Information Source:
[1] Mashable: Google Reader Stats are Bullshit (With Proof)

First thing that you have to do is create a Feedburner account (if you do not already have one) and retrieve a Feedburner RSS address. Once that is done, you plug it into your blogspot Settings | Site Feed information. This process has become a lot simpler from before.

Before, Blogger users had to autodiscovery tags within Blogger template codes or pretty much use some hacking skills. The integration of Feedburner into Blogger is an excellent example of how Google acts quickly with their acquisitions (with the exception of Dodgeball).

Note: Also after Google acquired Feedburner, premium services became free. Feedburner’s premium services used to cost roughly $5 per month.

References:
[1] Feedburner.com
[2] Blogger.com
[3] Burning Questions: The official Feedburner weblog: FeedBurner Integration for Blogspot Blogs

When I say higher value for clients, I mean money. Feedburner also hopes that the company will now be able to leverage Google technology to provide an advancement of centralized information for clients.

“Publishers want a single dashboard and single source for the metrics that give them feedback about the value of their content and its impact on their business. By combining our market leading feed metrics with Google’s market leading site and marketing analytics, publishers now get a comprehensive, 360-degree view of their audience,” stated Dick Costolo, the founder and CEO of Feedburner.

What does Google get out of this? More choices for advertisers using the Google AdWords campaign. Imagine this: as one of the biggest Internet advertising companies in America, you now own the rights to providing an option for advertisers to plug in advertisements in one of the biggest RSS analytics tracking software companies. Supposedly Feedburner is growing as fast as MySpace as well. It’s a win-win situation for Google and Feedburner.

The actual amount involved was not disclosed, but previous speculations believe that the amount was to be roughly around $100 million[3].

Feedburner currently hosts over 400,000 publisher RSS feeds and 100,000 podcasts. The company is based in Chicago, IL. Feedburner previous investors include Mobius Venture Capital[4], Portage Venture Partners[5], Sutter Hill Ventures[6], Drafer Fisher Jurvetson, and Union Square Ventures[7].

[1] Google Blog
[2] Feedburner Weblog
[3] Pulse 2.0: Rumor: Feedburner To Be Acquired For $100 Million by Google
[4] mobiusvc.com
[5] portageventures.com
[6] shv.com
[7] unionsquareventures.com

Because a lot of people just read summaries of blog posts and new stories on RSS-powered homepages such as NetVibes and PageFlakes, potential customers may not see the advertisements embedded within websites since it doesn’t show up. Since Feedburner has a program that allows publishers to embed advertisements within RSS feeds and collect commission from clicks, Google has taken an interest in the company.

The deal has not yet been confirmed by Google, but has been confirmed by TechCrunch[2]. The amount is worth $100 million and will be in cash. The founders will work for Google for a couple of years and the transaction should be completed within 2-3 weeks.

The company had 2 rounds of funding: $1 million Series A by Portage Ventures[3] and $9 million Series B funding from Mobius Venture Capital[4] and Union Square Ventures[5].

Many blogs and publishing companies route their own XML RSS feeds to be powered by Feedburner. This way companies can collect statistics on which RSS feeds for stories and/or blog posts are the most popular among readers. Pulse 2.0 is no exception. Our RSS feed URL is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/pulse2 [6]. Don’t forget to subscribe to us. Congratulations to Feedburner founders: Dick Costolo, Eric Lunt, Matt Shobe, Steve Olechowski.

[1] Vecosys blog post
[2] TechCrunch blog post
[3] portageventures.com
[4] mobiusvc.com
[5] unionsquareventures.com
[6] Pulse 2.0 RSS Feed