Los Angeles — Relentlessly striving to enhance its services for its ever-growing audiences, social media networking giant Facebook has just snapped up Friend.ly, a two-year-old social question and answer start-up service for an undisclosed sum, the companies announced Monday.
The friend.ly team disclosed the purchase in a blog post Monday, but neither side revealed the financial terms of the deal nor gave much information as to what Facebook will do with its latest acquisition.
The post also indicated that the Friend.ly team will join Facebook and concentrate on new developments for the social media network, while it will continue to operate as a separate service, the startup says.
“We are delighted to announce that we recently acquired Friend.ly, a Silicon Valley startup that created a really compelling way for people to express themselves and meet others through answering questions,” a Facebook representative said in a statement shared with Mashable. “We hold in high esteem the team’s efforts for some time now, and we are looking forward to having Ed [Baker] and his colleagues make a big impact on the way millions of people connect and engage with each other on Facebook.”
“We are thrilled about this because we feel the spirit of friend.ly corresponds well with Facebook’s vision, and we are excited to be joining such an innovative company,” the company noted in its blog post. “The friend.ly team will be focusing on new projects at Facebook…”
Image Courtesy (Friend.ly)
The official description is as follows:
Friend.ly is a place to explore friendships and discover people beyond the boundary of your social network. The best way to discover and meet new people, of course, is to talk to them, and there’s really no better conversation starter than a question. We have thousands of questions on friend.ly, many that are relevant to you and the people you find based on your Facebook profile and interests, as well as many questions about things you have probably never thought about before. No need to be bashful, time to have some fun making friends!
Answer questions, give compliments, and ask questions. Not only will you get to know your own friends better, but you might meet some new people too. The more answers you write, compliments you give, and questions you ask, the more you’ll learn about yourself and others.
We want to thank you–from the bottom of our hearts–for sharing your hopes, your memories and your humor with the friend.ly community. Thank you for your unwavering support of our product and your dedication to helping us make it better. Thank you also to our investors and advisors for your invaluable advice and your faith in our team and ideas.
The latest acquisition will boost the site’s F Ratio–that is, its Friends, Fans and Followers: This is the term conceived by trendwatching.com, and fits in with the larger of consumers using trusted sources to obtain information about products and brands, rather than rely on third-party advertising or perform extensive first-hand research.
For marketers, though, some implications are evident: Q&A are about to become even more significant to social media and search efforts. It will continue to push advertisers away from CTRs.
The latest series of modifications unveiled by Facebook–Page Insights, the “people talking about this” feed and so on–lead to the inexorable conclusion that Facebook does not want advertisers to focus on CTRs. Right now CTRs for Facebook are less than 1%. Facebook’s preference is for advertisers to place ads based on the power of social influence, which Friend.ly should facilitate.
Friend.ly, a budding two-year-old Mountain View, Calif.-based company with a 10 persons staff, is engaged in assisting people meet other people online and helping them acquaint their friends better. The service lets users ask and answer questions like, “If you were a bird, where would you fly first?” and “Are long-distance relationships possible?”
Facebook did not respond to questions about the deal or whether the entire friend.ly staff would be kept on.