Facebook Targeting Google and Twitter Fiends with FriendFeed Acquisition

Posted 08/12/2009 at 6:26am | by Paul Lilly

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In a deal The Wall Street Journal estimates to be worth $50 million, Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed, a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites.

"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."

While Facebook and FriendFeed both remain mum on financial terms of the deal, the real value may lie in FriendFeed's engineering team. FriendFeed's four founders helped to create Google's Gmail and Google Maps services, and will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams. All 12 of FriendFeed's employees will also retain their position, at least while long-term plans for the product are being hashed out.

In related news, Facebook also announced a new version of its search, which now allows members to search the last 30 days of the news feed for status updates, photos, links, videos, and notes being shared by friends.

"Facebook is competing with Twitter to be the center of real-time activity and updates for people online," said Greg Sterling, principal analyst at Sterling Market Intelligence.