Facebook has today announced that it will acquire social networking aggregator FriendFeed. The deal will see all employees moving to Facebook with the four founders of FriendFeed holding senior roles.
Often touted as the 'best service that nobody uses' FriendFeed had struggled to gain the kind of attention of rivals such as Facebook or Twitter, despite leading the market with innovative features.
Facebook's homepage redesign in March emulated much of FriendFeed's functionality. Brett Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder noted the obvious synergies in the acquisition:
“Over the past year and a half we felt our products and visions were evolving together, we really were thinking about these problems in the same way.” said Mr Taylor
"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,”
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg said that he had been a fan of FriendFeed for a while, saying “Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information. 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."
The financial terms of the deal have not yet been released.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Facebook paid nearly US$50 million in cash and stock
