Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Several readers including carpenter37 let us know that FriendFeed has sold itself to Facebook. Nobody who knows is talking about the terms of the deal. Here is Facebook's announcement, and here is FriendFeed's, which elaborates: "As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle." FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by four ex-Googlers, including Paul Buchheit — the engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google's "Don't be evil" motto — and Bret Taylor, a former group product manager who launched Google Maps.

Terms of the deal

[everynerd]

Sure, we know the terms of the deal. Roughly $50 Million. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124993350820120361.html [wsj.com]

Re:full circle

[werdnapk]

An open platform such as http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/ [google.com] ?

Re:Bah.

[Arrawa]

Actually, a social network called Hyves [hyves.nl] is just doing that. They have used XMPP, you can import twitter-feeds and import photo's from Flickr via rss. They are working on connecting their services to Facebook, Myspace etc.

For those who don 't know Hyves, its a 5-your old network with 9 million members, most of which are Dutch. In fact, most Dutch have a Hyves profile.

They make good money with advertisements, including socalled 'hyvertisement' where members can advertise with their friend's friends for a couple of euro's. Also payed for services make a decent buck for them.

For now, they have resisted offers from almost all other networks. Facebook is getting bigger in the Netherlands, but still lagging way behind Hyves. Other networks, except maybe last.fm or linkedin, are virtually non-existant here.