Dreaming about having your start-up acquired by Google one day? Be forewarned: apparently getting snapped up by the search behemoth doesn't necessarily spell a long and profitable life for your small business. To wit: just a little more than a year after Google purchased Feedburner, the popular RSS-feed ad network, for a fat $100 million, they quietly announced this week that they're killing it.

In a muted announcement on Google Groups, they broadcasted Feedburner's demise, and suggest that online publishers use Google AdSense instead, which they say will confer "valuable new revenue-earning potential."

Not so, say some bloggers and podcasters (check this video via Valleywag), who claim that Google - not Feedburner - is the problem. They say that Google simply made a mess of Feedburner, and that the start-up was actually delivering better results pre-acquisition. While Google's yet to comment on why they put Feedburner on the chopping block, we expect one of those popular post-mortems from the company's founders soon. Don't feel too bad for them though - at least they got out with Google money.