Feedburner Goes Beyond RSS, Acquires BlogBeat

In what should be the first of many more acquisitions to happen between startups, Feedburner has acquired blog analytics site BlogBeat. While there have been many acquisitions of startups by Yahoo (del.icio.us, Flickr) and Google (Writely, Measure Map), the Feedburner one marks what I think will be the beginning of mergers between companies that have been concentrating solely on doing one thing really good. Feedburner is without a doubt the premier service for enhancing and analyzing your RSS feeds (we use it as does just about everybody else). BlogBeat is one of many analytics services to sprout up in the past six months that concentrates on blog specific traffic analytics.

By providing RSS and site analytics under one roof, Feedburner will take one more step in front of everybody else providing one or the other service. This is why I think we’ll start to see more of these types of mergers/acquisitions happening. Many of these services have reached a point where they will really need to add additional services because they have reached a point where not much differentiates their offering from the competition. 37signals has slowly been integrating their various sites to work better together which could also be seen as a step in this same direction.

I’ve been a big proponent of single purpose sites. I like to find a tool that does what I want it to do and does it really well. However, at a certain point you’re then stuck with 10, 15, 20 or more sites that you’re trying to keep straight. Sure, they all do what you need well, but there are likely some that do make logical groupings. So I’ve slightly changed my mind and think the merging of some of these services make a lot of sense. Both for the companies and, most importantly, for the consumers. Keep the mergers to those that make sense and I think we’ll be better off than we are now.

If they start to get weird — say an email marketing site with a social bookmarking site — then I won’t be so sure.