New York — After failing to takeover Twitter last fall, Facebook’s shopping spree finally paid off, as Facebook on Monday announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, a Silicon Valley startup which allows members to see what their friends are doing online and share content — to become a social networking hub for an undisclosed amount of sum.
Financial details of the deal were not announced, but Facebook said that the Mountain View, Calif-based FriendFeed’s all of 12 employees will join Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters and will continue to operate the service as usual until the companies decide on a long-term integration plan, and its four founders will hold senior position on Facebook’s engineering and product teams, according to the companies.
“As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle,” FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor wrote in a blog post.
Facebook said FriendFeed.com “will continue to function as usual for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.”
FriendFeed aggregates and publishes updates from sites like Twitter, Yelp, Netflix, Blogger, and Flickr in one stream. It began operation in 2007 and is the brainchild of Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh — all former Google employees who worked on products like Gmail and Google Maps.
“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” Taylor said in a statement.
“Since I first tested FriendFeed, I have admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, in a statement. “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.”
“We cannot wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we have developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world,” added Taylor, previously the group product manager who launched Google Maps.
Another FriendFeed co-founder, Paul Buchheit, said Facebook’s engineers had created “simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”
Buchheit, another former Google employee, was the engineer behind Gmail and is credited with coining Google’s motto of “Don’t be evil.”
FriendFeed is a common social network sharing site that collects information from a variety of web sources and allows users to post about everything they are doing online, from updating their Facebook status, to uploading Flickr photos, and posting YouTube videos. Users can subscribe to receive updates about their friends’ profiles and can send their own updates to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.
“This is perhaps a smart move for Facebook, giving them ownership over a social network aggregator and allowing Facebook to make their site the overall hub for social networking,” said Dan Olds, an analyst for The Gabriel Consulting Group. “Presuming that Facebook can establish itself as a social networking hub for its users, this offers Facebook several advantages. The first is that it will keep users on Facebook pages longer, which means greater exposure for Facebook advertisers and higher ad rates. The stickier Facebook can become for users, the more revenue they can make from their advertising.”
While a conflict with Google looms, Facebook’s acquisition has raised a more immediate concern for the company: sustaining existing users of FriendFeed from defecting to other sites. No plans to shut down the site have been announced, but many users are nervous. “If Facebook does take FriendFeed down, chances are I will migrate with many of the other social media and programming pundits to a similar service,” says programmer Christopher Charabaruk. “Or if there is not one, I will probably help start one.”
Facebook, based in Palo Alto, California, is the fastest growing social network on the Internet. Earlier this year, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone confirmed that Facebook had looked to buy his company last fall.