Feedburner, one of the most useful and valuable free Web services in my experience, is now part of the big Goog, where, one can only hope they dedicate at least as much energy to the service side of this product as they naturally would to innovating it.

Feedburner launched in Chicago in 2004 and quickly became the premier RSS feed-burner for blogs and even newspaper Web sites. I’ve published dozens of feeds for a variety of projects using their tool and have also used Feedburner to publish media-rich RSS podcast feeds.

This deal is all-but officially announced, and is rumored to be an all-cash acquisition.

Google may be able to boost Feedburner’s struggling publisher’s ad network, but my main concern again here is Google’s imperfect track record in keeping acquired startups alive (of course, Dodgeball wasn’t nearly as established as Feedburner is when it was purchased).

Technorati put it’s recent funding to good use revealing a whole new layout today, a move that is taking them away from being just blogs.

First, they’ve eliminated search silos on Technorati. In the past, you had to know the difference between keyword search, tag search and blog directory search in order to make use of the full power of the site. They now provide you a simplified experience. Simply indicate what’s of interest to you and Technorati’s engine will assemble the freshest, hottest, most current social media from across the Live Web – Blogs, posts, photos, videos, podcasts, events, and more.

They’ve also worked really hard at making their user interface simpler, and more intuitive. They seemed to have pulled it off although I’m not sold on the ‘ticker’ floating at the top of the site. Smells a little ’99..

Read the full review over at the crunch

Yahoo is rumoured to be working on an attempted takeover of Bebo, Britain’s most popular social networking site, which could turn its British-born founder into the next internet billionaire.

Yahoo, one of the first big online portals, is thought to be willing to pay as much as $1bn for the site, according to Silicon Valley gossip.

NewsCorp paid $580m for MySpace in 2005, in a deal that first drew the market’s attention to the phenomenon. Google paid $1.76bn for YouTube, the internet home video site, last November.

Bebo has around 25m users worldwide, compared with MySpace’s 100m or so registered users. Birch is rumoured to have turned down an offer from BT worth about £300m last summer. Viacom, the US media giant which was outbid for MySpace, is also believed to have made an offer last year. Bebo is backed by Benchmark Capital, the private equity firm.

Yahoo made a $1bn bid for Facebook, another fast-growing social networking site, last year. The offer was rejected by the site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Friendster, one of the first social networking sites, turned down an all-share offer from Google in 2003, which would have been worth about $1bn to its founders today. It has since drifted out of favour with internet consumers, with the monthly traffic on its site dwarfed by newer sites – such as Bebo. (Ouch!!)

Reported last week that Microsoft was in talks to buy Yahoo for a rumored $50 Billion, if this deal goes through Microsoft would significantly increase its online advertising market share which is now dominated by Google. The Redmond giant would own two of the biggest social networking properties on the web, Bebo and their very own Live Spaces.

Although, the Telegraph (who broke the news) isn’t exactly known for breaking tech M&A stories, and the rumor has an exceptionally weak source – “according to silicon valley gossip” the article says. That sounds like something the Telegraph’s correspondent overheard after ten or twelve cocktails last night at a party. And while I don’t doubt that Yahoo is sniffing around Bebo, $1 billion seems a tad high for the service.

MyBlogLog, the “Whos been reading your blog” widget provider, was acquired by Yahoo late last year. As with many startups acquired by big corporations it seemed MyBlogLog was set for the dead pool with many months passing without any upgrades from their new owner. Although finally, Yahoo has stepped up and announced a sweep of upgrades and changes for the blog community.

The new features include a filter for offensive photos and the ability to sign off so you don’t show up on blogs you don’t want to. The improvements are an obvious since MyBlogLog was suffering from serious spamming. After it’s initial buzz, MyBlogLog’s growth failed to catch on because of spam and scaling issues. What this new announcement means is that an effort by Yahoo to escape the PR hit that Google suffered in its handling of the Dodgeball acquisition.

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A few weeks back we reported that “Photobucket was out of space” which was a play on the fact that Myspace had blocked the photosharing/widget site. Ironically, this led to acquisition talks and now its been confirmed Myspace has bought Photobucket for $250 million in cash with another $50 mil in the pipeline.

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Microsoft to acquire Yahoo in the biggest acquisition in IT history! Full story over at Mashable

This deal will be huge if it goes ahead: Microsoft has reacted to Google’s purchase of DoubleClick by stepping up talks with Yahoo about a possible acquisition/merger. Estimated pricetag for Yahoo? $50 billion. Microsoft and Yahoo have spoken in the past, but Google has piled on the pressure with the DoubleClick deal and now Microsoft has asked Yahoo to re-enter talks about the acquisition, says the NYPost. The price estimate, meanwhile, comes from Wall Street analysts.

Apparently the Yahoo stock is rising because of the buy out talk.

Shares of Yahoo Inc. surged more than 17% on Friday after reports that Microsoft may try to buy the Internet-search firm after being beaten to other deals by Google Inc. A Yahoo-Microsoft combo would make for a stronger foil to Google, the Internet search engine and advertising giant. Shares of Yahoo (YHOO) rallied sharply in early Friday action after the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal reported that Microsoft may want to buy the firm in what could be a $50 billion deal. Shares of Microsoft (MSFT) slipped more than 1%.

Yahoo teaming up with the Redmond giant would surely lead to a world class contextual advertising system to rival Adsense. International publishers have been at the mercy of Google’s Adsense as the Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) and MS Adcentre is still in US beta.

[Update] Forbes also has the story, good read.

This is crazy, if Google can afford to spend this much on eloborate employee benefits how much are they making of us? (Adwords, Adsense)

Time features an article about life in the Googleplex. What googlers do when they don’t code great applications? They swim, create graffiti, play volleyball, eat three free gourmet meals a day that can be eaten in a cafeteria adorned by artwork created by Google employees and unwind with a professional massage.

The article is a wonderful insight of what it’s like inside Google headquarters in Silicon Valley. I wonder if the employees ever do any work. But that’s because I’m jealous.

Photos after the jump

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‘Google Personalized Homepage’ will be rebranded as iGoogle and will let you build your own gadgets using wizards. The gadgets are very simple and are more like containers for things that matter to you: photos, videos, events.

The wizards let you enter the settings for seven new gadget templates:

1. Photo album – add up to 7 photos that can be rotated.

2. GoogleGram – enter seven greeting messages.

3. Daily Me – type what you are doing.

4. Countdown – count the days until a special event.

5. Simple list – you can use it as a ToDo list, shopping list.

6. YouTube videos – up to 10 videos.

7. Freeform gadget – add an image and some text.

Much like FaceBook The iGoogle gadgets are a way of staying in touch and communicating with your friends.

[Via:Google Blogoscoped]