Confirmation of the rumors started with typical Dick Costolo panache: “Unlike the rumor that FeedBurner is nearly code-complete on a multiplayer Wii edition, the blog posts, phone calls and conjecture about our future as part of the Google family tree are now officially true.”
What a great team and a great product. I first met Dick via Spyonit at a conference at the W Hotel in San Francisco back in 1999 (?). When the “fantastic four” (Dick, Steve, Eric, and Matt) re-emerged from their post-Spyonit-acquisition-induced-purgatory with FeedBurner, I was interested. I’m ashamed all we worked out for CNET was the Mobile Feed Reader (now gone), but so it goes. First blog post for FeedBurner: February 23, 2004. I’m not sure when the FB team would start the clock, but that’s 1194 days from first blog post to acquisition announcement (or 3 years, 3 months, 9 days).
Google looks pretty smart here, whatever the price. Congrats to all of FeedBurner.