Friendfeed Acquired by Facebook

LONDON - FEBRUARY 03: (FILE PHOTO)  In this ph...
Image by Getty Images via Daylife

We’ve all seen the googlezon video, could this be the beginings of a new video to be created?

It was just announced that facebook would be purchasing friendfeed.com the amount is not clear at the moment, however what is known is that all friendfeed staff will be joining facebook and the four co-founders “will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams”.

We can’t wait to see what the friendfeed team bring to facebook, although it has been a clear inspiration of how facebook has evolved, with allowing users to import their activities from other social sites such as last.fm, youtube, flickr etc.

Details from the press release:

PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founders. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “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.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Watch out for my own googlezon theory on what’s going to happen next.

For now enjoy the original:

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Ruk Cooray is Co-Founder of LDN.cm you can find him on twitter here rambling about something or the other

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