Jason Kincaid of Techcrunch just broke that FriendFeed was acquired by social networking goliath Facebook. Details are sparse and the post itself is short as more details flood in but already the FriendFeed community is going nuts about the acquisition.
An acquisition like this for Facebook makes complete and utter sense. Facebook duplicates many of FriendFeed’s core functions and has been accused in the past of playing copy-cat. Also, FriendFeed is truly real-time and has proven to be scalable. It would probably be cheaper in the long haul for Facebook to simply acquire the technology rather than build it themselves. Facebook has also go their hands on the wonderful team of FriendFeed made up of ex-googlers.
Post will be updated as details roll in from sources.
- UPDATE -
We know have the press release that Facebook has put out:
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-founder. 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.
- UPDATE -
Now that the smoke has settled somewhat, what the hell does this mean? Simply that Facebook is not taking Twitter sitting down. FriendFeed, Facebook, and Twitter were the big three in quasi-real time social sharing. Now there are two players. Which one has revenue? Not Twitter. With the new arsenal of tech centric users that Facebook just bought, it can reopen an assualt on Twitter.
This war is just getting started. Hold onto your status, there is a war being fought over where you are going to post it.
- UPDATE -
You can read the FriendFeed press release here: http://blog.friendfeed.com/2009/08/friendfeed-accepts-facebook-friend.html
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Image via TechCrunch. Thanks MG.
