Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Facebook has just announced that it acquired FriendFeed, the real-time content sharing service. Facebook is moving towards a real-time news stream and adopting some of the FriendFeed’s features like comments and “likes” on stream. FriendFeed is liked by the geek crowd but not so much by the masses but it’s real-time web features are quite useful.

With the acquisition FriendFeed feature is in danger, some of it’s features may be integrated to Facebook but it may not stand independent. Co-founder of FreindFeed Bret Taylor on Freindfeed blog says “FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team.”, Also the FriendFeed API will function normally for the time being.

FriendFeed is more of a real-time news feed and Facebook is not so much yet, so this move will clearly help Facebook to improve the real-time news feed and perhaps compete with Twitter effectively. More importantly Facebook got talented developers to it’s team, FriendFeed co-founders are former Google Employees.

Facebook Press Release:

PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.