One of the social networking behemoths, Facebook Inc, has acquired the social media start-up, FriendFeed, thereby grabbing the newly formed organization and on top it, a couple of ex-Google engineers, who created FriendFeed. Facebook spent $15 million in cash and the remaining amount in Facebook stocks to buy FriendFeed, bringing the total amount to $50 million. The terms of the deal are as of now, unknown, but Facebook has suggested that the FriendFeed service will work as usual, till the time, new plans and strategies for the company’s future can be formulated.
Being a start-up organization, FriendFeed isn’t all that popular amongst internet users, but with Facebook’s expertise, FriendFeed is expected to achieve much greater heights, as the concept behind the FriendFeed is pretty much the same as in the micro blogging website, Twitter. FriendFeed allows uses to share their content on various social networking platforms, in real time, and such a concept is very much in demand these days.
According to Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research analyst),
“Facebook’s big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter. These guys now how to build scalable, social applications.”
Both the social networking companies had been in talk with other for some time and after sufficient discussions, came to the conclusion that this deal would be extremely beneficial for both. Facebook is one of the biggest social networks across the internet, with a member base of 250 million registered users. Recently, the company got a boost in its operating costs, with $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies, that is a Russian firm. This latest addition of funds helped Facebook shares reach an estimate of $10 billion.
Here is Facebook’s official Press Release.
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-founders. 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.
