Google's FeedBurner buy gives Yahoo!, Microsoft another reason to cry

Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) acquisition of FeedBurner will only widen its already huge lead over Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) and MIcrosoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) in online advertising. Google's acquisition strategy lately, although coming under scrutiny, is handily beating its closest rival. Will Yahoo! be left behind soon?

Although FeedBurner is not a large company with 431 publishing customers worldwide, the RSS feed generation that the company provides has some large-scale global clients like AOL and The Wall Street Journal. This gives Google a ready-made avenue to sell more products and services in the advertising vein where it currently reigns supreme over the competition. Advertisers are finding blogs an effective way to target small but very passionate audiences, and FeedBurner is a market leader in the providing of RSS feeds for bloggers to global media companies. FeedBurner's acquisition makes Google ever more relevant in the world of information dispersal throughout the world.

I'm left to wonder if Yahoo! was even in the hunt for FeedBurner or whether Google pulled the rug out from under its nemesis once again here. Yahoo! has great reach now with customers and its Project Panama keyword bidding platform shows great promise. But the company needs much more to remain competitive.

Microsoft can't rest easy either. Its recent aQuantive buy was given by Microsoft as giving it a "complete set of tools" in order to more fully compete with Google in the online advertising space. Will FeedBurner up the ante once again as Microsoft struggles to gain share on Google? I'm not 100% sure on that, but Microsoft has to be scratching its head yet again. Perhaps another "tool" Microsoft may want to buy would include a FeedBurner competitor like Technorati.