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.

Shame it's not the other way around

[Anonymous Coward]

FriendFeed is awesome and FaceBook is sucktacular. Let's hope FF doesn't become some crappy FB app.

Another stupid buy out

[XPeter]

How could FriendFeed (A fantastic site with much potential) sell to Facebook?! This is like the Sun-Oracle deal, when a good company sells itself to pure evil.

What's next, a Microsoft-Google merger (Googlesoft)? I'll let Slashdot choose the evil on that one ;)

Re:Another stupid buy out

[masterlogan2000]

How could FriendFeed sell to Facebook?!

$$$

Re:full circle

[TheModelEskimo]

Do you remember when search engines were also a dime a dozen? I remember about 9 or 10 years ago, people coming into the office and grabbing all their stuff, because they were moving to whatever the search engine flavor of the week was.

So the answer seems to be, "There's room for one or two." Just gotta give them time to whittle each other down.

Re:Bah.

[hyades1]

Really, I'd be satisfied if they'd just start charging money and quit trying to do data mining on my social life.

If you started paying, do you really believe they wouldn't collect your money AND data mine your social life? Your innocence is refreshing.

May I suggest that if a man approaches you with a business arrangement involving African personages of royal ancestry, you consider that he may not have your best interests at heart?

Re:Bah.

[Eil]

I want an easily configurable messaging utility that only allows trusted contacts, and some photo upload and publishing ability (with comments) that piggybacks on the trusted communication.

Publish your status (tweets) as RSS, upload your photos to flickr, and post your rants on blogspot. That's what we did in the olden days. (Two years ago.)

But I've been thinking about ways to break the walled garden and have come to 2 conclusions:

1) The garden is already here. I don't know if there will be anything bigger than Twitter or Facebook, or how long they'll last but they will undoubtedly go down in history next to Email and IRC as far as breakthrough Internet communication methods. They're big enough now that they won't be going away soon. You won't tear half the population away from either just by building the same thing and saying, "here, this one's open." They don't care. Social networking is here to stay and Facebook and Twitter let them do what they want to do.

2) That said, there's really no reason that an open social networking framework couldn't be built upon something like XMPP [wikipedia.org]. Website operators could use this framework to setup niche sites ("death metal macebook" or "gardening rakebook") that users could sign up with and connect with users at other sites without leaving their own. The framework would allow basic instant messaging, status, blogs, media content, etc. The downfall to this is that a) FB and twitter are already too well-entrenched 2) Every website wants to be their own walled garden, completely isolated from the rest of the web unless its on their own narrow terms.

Re:Bah.

[f1vlad]

I'd agree with anything but 'quit trying to innovate' ? Why would anyone consider that?