Facebook buys FriendFeed
With news that Facebook has bought real-time feed aggregator FriendFeed, we take a closer look at the union.
Facebook paid nearly $50 million for FriendFeed, of which $15 million was in cash and $32.5 million was in Facebook stock (valuing Facebook at $6.5 billion).
FriendFeed has inspired Facebook on many occasions, for example, Facebook used FriendFeed’s idea of “liking” posts and importing images and videos from third party sites such as Flickr and Youtube.
Although Facebook had recently offered to buy Twitter (an offer Twitter declined), it has had its eye on FriendFeed for nearly two years, approaching them just two weeks after their launch in October 2007. Some may consider FriendFeed a better buy than Twitter, especially since FriendFeed’s real-time search engine (now also being used by Facebook) is generally considered to have a stronger interface and be more useable than Twitter’s search.
However, not everybody seems happy with this merger. Around half of FriendFeed users who commented on FriendFeed’s announcement that they were merging with Facebook expressed concern that FriendFeed was going to be shut and that there was a lack of similarities between the two companies. They also seemed worried that FriendFeed was going “mainstream”. However, FriendFeed founder Paul Buchhiet stated that there were no immediate plans to close FriendFeed (source: Mashable).
