The Beginning of the End for Feedburner?

A Google takeover may be the stuff of an entrepreneurs' dreams, but things don't always work out so nicely. Rather than riding Google's high to internet dominance, more than one company acquired by the search giant has seen its prospects languish due to lack of support and resources.

After an announcement today from RSS-feed managing service FeedBurner, it looks like things might be going downhill again. Google purchased FeedBurner for a reported $100 million a year ago, and today, the site informally announced the closure of the FeedBurner Ad Network through a Google Groups thread:

No new applications for FAN publishers are being accepted and we expect the broad variety of options provided through AdSense
(including the new AdSense for Feeds product, powered with FeedBurner feeds) will give publishers valuable new revenue-earning potential.

But FeedBurner users are unhappy about the switch, and a complaint from CenterNetworks publisher Allen Stern speaks to a familiar problem:

“Once they got acquired, it seems like the sales staff just went away. Slowly but surely all the advertising campaigns went away.”

So will this migration to AdSense be a seemless transition, or will FeedBurner go the way of companies like Dodgeball, Urchin and Jaiku, who learned that once Google buys the farm, they often lose interest?

Photo: Dodgeball