My Soul, and 10 Other Things that Google Owns
The headlines just don't stop for Google. But with the now complete acquisition of Feedburner, are there any parts of our online lives that don't reside somewhere within the Googleplex? Through acquisitions and a few thousands …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Feedburner close caps a deal first flagged in yesterday's "It's True-gle!", and it lands during an unusually dense week for the company: Developer Day brought the launch of Google Gears for offline web apps, and Street View triggered a public privacy debate from homeowners like Mary Kalin-Casey who found their houses photographed without warning.
The piece is a listicle, but its premise tracks a real pattern that predates this week — the Washington Post was already cataloguing Google's acquisition habit in December 2005 ("Googling Google") — so Feedburner reads less as a standalone purchase than as another node absorbed into an advertising-and-attention machine that already spans search, video, maps and now RSS.
First-order effects
- RSS publishers on Feedburner now have their subscriber data, analytics and feed-ad inventory inside Google's stack, consolidating distribution relationships that were previously vendor-neutral.
- Street View's 'Candid Camera' backlash puts Google on the defensive over imagery it captured without notice, just as Gears extends how much user activity can run through Google-hosted software offline.
Second-order effects
- Independent feed-management rivals and RSS ad networks face a buyer whose ownership of both the publishing tool and the advertising pipeline squeezes them out of the middle of the transaction.
- Advertisers gain a single counterparty across search, video and now feeds, raising switching costs for publishers who would otherwise move their feeds elsewhere.
Third-order effects
- If each acquisition folds another layer of the open web into one ad-funded platform, the industry drifts toward a structure where Google is not a participant in web infrastructure but the landlord of it — with privacy disputes like Street View becoming the recurring cost of that concentration.
- Specialist tools built by independents increasingly end up absorbed rather than competed against, shifting founder incentives toward building for acquisition instead of durability.
The trend: Web services are consolidating around a single advertising-funded platform, with each acquisition converting an independent layer of the open web into Google infrastructure.