FeedBurner – Product of The Brilliant Idea of Four Tech Geeks
At the beginning of the 21st century, dot com boom in the world and massive websites were launched for the first time. In that scenario, a group of four people grab the opportunity and set up FeedBurner. It was a powerful idea to enhance the operationality of the website.
Feedburner was their second company to hit in the tech world. At that time, RSS was just started to gain some real momentum. In such a situation, they launched the Feedburner at an impeccable timing. After that, the company achieved success in a very short period.
Backstory of FeedBurner
It is a web feed management provider based in Chicago. In 2004, a group of four people launched the service. Soon it became popular among publishers and bloggers. It is the product of a brilliant idea of the four brilliant minds, who were working at Andersen consulting.
They noticed that the web is the future of networking. They proposed the idea of feed management services to the firm they were working with. But their idea was uninterested in Andersen consulting. Therefore, they launched own successful services in the website tracking. FeedBurner was one of their popular services. It is launched back in 2004 by Dick Costolo, Steve Olechowski, Eric Lunt, and Matt Shobe.
Dick Costolo
Dick Costolo was the co-founder and CEO of FeedBurner till 2007. After Google acquired the Feedburner, he served as Group Product Manager on the Ads up to 2009. From 2010 to 2015 he served as a CEO at twitter.
Personal Life
He was born on September 10, 1963. In 1985, Costolo attended the University of Michigan for his graduation in communication & computer science. During his senior year, he did several plays as a theatre artist. He wanted to work in improvisational comedy. So, after graduation, he rejected many job offers in the technical field.
However, he joined Andersen Consulting and severed for as long as 8 years. That time, he co-founded a web design company, known as Burning Door Networked Media. Just before the FeedBurner foundation, Costolo also co-founded SypOnIt.
Later Achievements
He served at National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2011. After that, in the year 2015, he was the consultant for HBO Tv series popular as Silicon Valley. In 2016, he joined as a partner at Index ventures.
Costolo was in the list of Business Insiders’ Silicon Valley’s most impressive CEO. Also, he marked the name in the TIME magazine’s list of Top 10 influential U.S Tech CEO.
Eric Lunt
He was one of the office colleagues of Costolo at Andersen Consulting. Currently, he is CTO at Signal. Eric co-founded SpyOnIt and Feedburner with the Costolo and other two partners. In fact, after the foundation of Feedburner, he served as CTO till Google acquired the company.
Lunt is a Princeton University graduate.
Steve Olechowski
Steve Olechowski also worked at Andersen Consulting. He contributed to the foundation of Feedburner in 2004. Where he served as COO till 2007. After that, he worked as a project manager with Google on social content syndication.
As a brilliant tech person, he was always in search of new ideas. As a result, he founded on more companies in 2011 named as Blinkfire Analytics. Also, he is the director at Plug and Plays Chicago.
Matt Shobe
A tech geek, who is brilliant in designing is well familiar as Voice of Feedburner. He is the co-founder of Feedburner, who also worked as a chief designer officer. After Google acquired the FeedBurner, he worked with Google for three years. After that, he joined the BigDoor Media as a chief design officer in 2011.
In 2014, Shobe began his journey at AngelList. He oversees product and user experience.
Apart from that, Shobe inspires students for entrepreneurship. He sponsors Shobe prize to encourage entrepreneurship. Also, helps to promote start-up businesses with connecting them to popular start-up communities.
Services offered by FeedBurner
The custom RSS feeds and management tools of FeedBurner helped numerous bloggers, podcasters, and other online content publishers. The company provided good control of the website to understand the audience. The basic services provided by Feedburner is traffic analysis. Also, it offers an optional advertising system for publishers. Also, with FeedBurner’s feed, data about subscribers could be easily found.
We can call it as a typical Web 2.0 service. As it had provided web service APIs allowing much other software to interact with it.
FeedBurner Acquisition by Google
In 2007, Google bought FeedBurner which was popular for its feed management service. However, rumors said that Google paid a big amount of $100 million. After a month later, Google made MyBrand and TotalStats, the two popular services of FeedBurner free to users.
On 26 May 2011, Google shut down the FeedBurner APIs. After a year, Google retired Adsense of feeds and shut it down shortly. Till 2007, FeedBurner hosted over a million feeds. Around 584,832 publishers used the FeedBurner for blogs as well as for about 142,534 podcast feeds.
Jayshri is an Electronics Engineer, but her passion towards writing made her to be in this field. Apart from content writing, she loves reading, writing and surfing on various topics. In her free time, she likes to watch TV series and news. Sherlock Holmes is her all time favorite show. Jayshri loves cooking various Indian-western dishes.