Anybody checking (FeedBurner) RSS referrer logs sees that there is a page long list of aggregators out there, in a very fragmented market.
It is therefore not surprising to hear from Nick Bradbury about the acquisition by NewsGator (for cash & stock, no valuation information) of his company, maker of FeedDemon and TopStyle. Om was once again first to scoop, and to confirm, the deal. Greg Reinacker, the CTO and Founder of NewsGator, just posted about the sequence of events leading to the deal. Here are also the official press release and the Q&A.
There has already been quite a bit of analysis: Dave Winer, Niall Kennedy, Tony Gentile. And Chris Pirillo has an interview up with both Nick and Greg (who has yet to comment on the acquisition). Fred Wilson also chimed in with his views on NewsGator going after a rollup strategy of the space.
Dave predicts the acquisition of a Mac aggregator, like NetNewsWire – which would make sense, especially given the popularity of the product (based on my stats). However, like Tony, I am not really following on FeedBurner or even Technorati. Both for cap table/deal/integration/execution issues (even if these companies have both DFJ and Mobius as investors), as for "impedance mismatch" from a product/commercial standpoint. Brad Feld actually dismissed the concept of piling up these three cos as "a dumb idea" in his post regarding the acquisition.
As most commentators put it, this deal makes a lot of sense. FeedDemon was already plugged on the NewsGator back-end, it is a great application that complements NewsGator’s version: Outlook, Web, Mobile, MediaCenter. Nick says that we can expect a synchronization of read/unread/delete marks across the different versions, which is what I have been waiting for! Yeah!
And I hope that FeedDemon’s podcast download/management capabilities will make it into NewsGator Outlook.
More strategically, NewsGator is certainly positioning itself as a "consumer enterprise" solution, which includes access to premium data (esp. Factiva) and I would suppose the addition of some management, permissioning and caching capabilities, really meant for the enterprise.
Congratulations to all: Greg, Nick, Brad, JB.
Oh, and I really can’t wait to get my beta version of the latest NewsGator deployed Just got it – more later! And I do hope to see some tagging popping up as well, like Rojo’s cool implementation.
By popular demand, previous Social Media Consolidation Acts are: