Binary Digest

Its the news of the year and its some really hot news. Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner has now been made official. FeedBurner and Google both have published about the big deal of the year on their respective blogs. The rumored price of $100 million is still a mystery but at least we know that FeedBurner is now a family of Google

Google’s Acquisition of FeedBurner

It was the biggest buzz of the year when it came to rumors that the big search engine daddy has plans to acquire the pseudo “Google of Feeds” i.e. FeedBurner. It was rumored that it is going to be a deal worth $100 million but still that has not been confirmed yet. The Official Google Blog and FeedBurner Blog both have blogged about the great deal but have not disclosed the acquisition price yet.

Google + FeedBurner = Google of Feeds

Google is very pleased about its new acquisition and promises to provide enhanced tools for FeedBurner which can help users interact with web content in a more efficient manner. Moreover Google says that this will improve the experiences of feed users, advertisers, and publishers.

FeedBurner, on the other hand, is also very much happy about being acquired by Google and proclaim that this partnership will bring more to the users and will open a new dimension to rss and feed content

Last night the Bungee Labs team invited the first group of developers to Bungee Connect, officially opening up the early access beta program. The initial group of early access customers is small, but we intend to ramp up quickly as we carefully monitor the system for performance and scaling, adding groups of 50 until all registered beta developers get their invites (we currently have around two thousand early access sign-ups ready to get their invites).

The adjective “exciting” tends to be overused (I’m guilty of that), but it really was an “exciting” moment to send our first set of access invites last night and move on to the next phase of Bungee Connect’s evolution. The pic below shows the moment we (Ted in fact) hit send on the first set of invites to our beta customers from Lyle’s hotel room in Sunnyvale and doing so (as Ted says) with high fives and sighs of relief mixed with no small amount of anticipation in the hotel room and back at the ranch.

From left to right: Alex “me” Barnett, Ted “not-that-reverend” Haeger, Lyle “on-the-ball” Ball and Brad “we-need-hints” Hintze.

Now we’ve got Bungee Connect to this point, it’s time to forge ahead with supporting the beta developers, responding to and collating feedback, work through the engineering and usability improvements, fixing bugs and known issues, and advance the user education content and experience so developers can get productive as quickly as possible. We have a lot of work ahead of us before we get to GA, but it’s great to hit this milestone for the whole team - very energizing.

With all the analysis and reactions to the Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive last, I missed the fact that aQuantive is the parent company of the interactive marketing agency Razorfish (Avenue A/Razorfish). Brian Fling pointed this out and linked to this Advertising Age article commenting on this dimension of the deal:

“Last week’s $6 billion agreement to buy aQuantive is not just a bid to catch up with Google and Yahoo in ad sales. It also gives Redmond something it hasn’t had before: Its very own ad agency. The addition of the highly regarded Avenue A/Razorfish to its portfolio signals that Microsoft, in addition to being a media seller, has crept into the agency business, blurring the once-clear distinctions between those who hawk technology and those who provide marketing services.”

So on to the obvious question next - will Avenue A/Razorfish be divested any time soon? Apparently not:

“Industry observers who expected the deal were shocked it didn’t include an announcement that Microsoft would somehow offload Avenue A with a spinoff or a sale. While insiders seemed convinced it would divest the business, Microsoft was public and definitive in denying there were any such plans. On the contrary, a Microsoft executive emphasized that Avenue A’s capabilities actually sweetened the deal. “

Of course, this could just be temporary PR messaging to see the deal through, diverting from an unwritten plan to execute the divestment once the dust settles. But maybe not. This Microsoft / aQuantive deal would be somewhat analogous to Google (or IBM) buying up WPP or Yahoo (or NewsCorp / MySpace) buying Omnicom…and they would follow a trend:

“…recently the deal-making has taken on a different color. Interpublic, which has less cash to spend, has been taking stakes in media plays such as Facebook and platforms such as the do-it-yourself ad solution Spot Runner. A day before the aQuantive deal, WPP Group, home of JWT and Ogilvy & Mather, said it would pay $650 million for 24/7 Real Media, an ad-serving platform.”

As Michael Creamer points out, this deal appears to be a strong signal that previously unrelated segments of the economy are converging, a further realization of the digitial convergence predictions made in the last decade.

In what may be a not so odd coincidence, I discovered the following two items in the space of five minutes, which made me wonder whether most websites could be fairly accused of “spying” on their users:

The item on the left is from the beta version of CNN’s redesigned site, which, like the Amazon recommendation system, recommends articles based on your browsing history (via Bivings Report).

The item on the right — just an image! — is the widget version of a service called Spyjax that exploits a common browser feature — turning visited links red — to determine which other sites a visitor to a site using Spyjax has visited. If you go here, you will see your browser history displayed in the widget. It’s quite a chilling experience. I set up a Spyjax account and installed the code because I wanted to display the widget here to make the point dramatically, but I immediately took the code off after seeing my own visitor report. It felt so wrong — it felt evil.

(Sites using Spyjax will show a call to merchantos.com in the status bar when loading.)

You can see from the screen capture above some of the sites that the widget immediately determined I had visited — Noggin, for my daughter, Pair, because I’m probably going to switch my hosting service, and PlentyOfFish — strictly for business.

So why the comparison with the CNN recommend feature? Because they’re both cut from the same cloth. CNN’s recommendations seem benign — and it can be a useful service. But those recommendations are based on spying on your browsing without your permission.

Of course, every site that uses cookie-based traffic analytics effectively spies on you by planting a cookie in your browser. Any site that has a “most read” or “most emailed” list is essentially spying on user behavior.

Many sites, including many mainstream media brands, work with Tacoda, Revenue Science, or other behavioral targeting companies to take plant cookies that follow you everywhere you go — and serve ads based on your “behavior.”

There are some people who block cookies entirely, and many more people probably would if there weren’t so many sites that required cookies in order to function properly.

It will continue to be the subject of increasingly intense debate where to draw the line for user privacy. Media sites (and what isn’t media these days?) will need to keep a close eye on how the privacy pendulum is swinging.