Updates: 1. Add to this list the rumored sale of Weblogs.com ping service to Verisign. Hmmm…Wonder if they’ll do something about the spam-blogs. Pingoat is great about that. Maybe someone should give them millions of dollars. 2. The Gawker Media Empire (owners of the rad LifeHacker blog, is loud and clear about not being for sale. In fact they’ve made a deal instead to get their content translated into multiple languages to reach more readers. Cool.
A series of interesting developments in the world of corporate acquisitions over the last few days:
- Newsgator (my favorite RSS reader) buys Net News Wire, a Mac-based desktop RSS reader; one of the oldest and most popular desktop RSS readers. You can read about Newsgator’s acquisition of Net News Wire here.
- Yahoo! buys Upcoming.org, an awesome online events calender with tags and feeds. Check out this announcement from the Upcoming.org folks and the discussion late in the long list of comments.
- And the most interesting of all in my mind…AOL to buy Weblogs Inc. You can read about the Weblogs Inc. blogging network in this exclusive story about the acquisition, or just go visit their site and you’ll see what they are doing. It’s rad. There are lots and lots of cool blogs in this network, but The Social Software Blog is my favorite.
So what does this mean for Web2.0? This is certainly becoming the dominant business model – build something cool, get a large user base, then sell to a larger company. (Like eBay buying Skype just last month.) It kind of makes me sad. Isn’t independence a viable business model? What examples are there of such acquisitions not slowing innovation, openness and responsiveness to a crawl? Please tell me if you know.
Technorati Tags: upcoming.org, netnewswire, newsgator, yahoo, weblogsinc, AOL, acquisitions, Web2.0