jjprojects

According to the Wall Street Journal, Facebook has acquired FriendFeed for a substantial US$50 million, in a combination of cash and Facebook stock.

Regarding the acquisition, via the Friendblog, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor states:

“Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers”

He mentions that FriendFeed will continue to operate in the meantime, until the two parties figure out what to do over the long-term. I assume that eventually Friendfeed will cease to exist and much of the smart technology involved in FriendFeed will end up emerging as new features in Facebook. That seems to have been happening lately anyway.

Facebook’s press release about the acquisition mentions that all four founders of FriendFeed will now hold senior positions on Facebook’s engineering and product teams. This could mean that they will have quite an influence on the way Facebook develops in the future.

One question that immediately springs to my mind is: will we soon see Facebook change so that feeds update in real-time in a similar way to Friendfeed? It was only 4 months ago that Friendfeed implemented this change itself. Some people didn’t like this change, I thought it was definitely a step forward. It’ll be interesting to see how Facebook develops over the coming months.