Facebook Becomes Friends With FriendFeed

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a Silicon Valley company that lets Facebook members see what their friends are doing online and share content. For the time being, FriendFeed will continue to operate as normal until both teams determine longer term plans for the product.

The acquisition provides Facebook with an opportunity to expand into real-time search. Because of its ability to conduct real-time search, FriendFeed has been described as a rival to Twitter. You may recall that Facebook attempted to buy Twitter last year but the deal never materialized.


"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends…. 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," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a statement.

FriendFeed was founded by four former Google employees in October 2007. The four founders of FriendFeed will be placed in senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams. Other employees of FriendFeed will join the Facebook team.