FriendFeed, a social media tracker created in 2007 by a gang of ex-Googlers, has been acquired by Facebook for an undisclosed amount.
“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 chief executive, in a news release. “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 works like an RSS reader for social media content, pulling in and publishing feeds from more than 60 Web sites, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube for easy skimming.
It’s a logical fit for Facebook, which has slowly been shifting its focus to becoming more of a real-time social broadcasting service.
But the bigger win for Facebook may be the technical talent that comes with the deal: FriendFeed’s founders were involved in the creation of Google’s Gmail service.
“The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision,” FriendFeed said in a blog post Monday. “Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.
As part of the acquisition, the entire FriendFeed staff of 12 will migrate over to Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif. The four FriendFeed founders will transition into senior engineering roles at Facebook, but the two companies are still ironing out the remaining details of the integration, said Elliot Schrage, a spokesman for Facebook.
“I don’t think those conversations have gone into any detail at this point,” Mr. Schrage said. “Both FriendFeed and Facebook have a natural affinity for making the Web more social.”
For the time being, FriendFeed will remain fully operational as a standalone service.
Source: NYTimes
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