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 have shocked the world by acquiring feed aggregators Friendfeed and also hiring the social networking sites four founders to important positions inside the newly purchased company.

The four founders of Friendfeed were ex-google staff Paul Buchheit, Sanjeev Singh, Jim Norris and Bret Taylor. Most notably, Buchheit was the mastermind behind creating gmail, launching inital advertising products as well as the trusted don’t be evil philosophy.

It is not a huge surprise that Facebook have finally bought Friendfeed since over the past couple of years, they have taken numerous features from the content aggregator site including the “like” option. In addition, Facebook knew themselves that their competitors had a more developed news feed set-up with real time updates, which users from facebook could really do with since they have to refresh the page every other minute!

In addition to acquiring Friendfeed, Facebook have also announced that it is going to release its own unique search engine and they feel that having ex google engineers by their side from Friendfeed will give them all the experience they require! Are Facebook going in for the kill to be the next search engine giant by competing against Google? The next couple of months will be very interesting to see since Google will soon be concerned with how much traffic they recieve in comparison to the ever growing Facebook.

Friendfeed’s reaction to the purchase

Earlier today, Friendfeed released their own press release displaying their feelings towards the takeover, expressing this is the best thing for the company:

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. 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 to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

Facebook’s feelings towards the acquiring of Friendfeed

Yesterday, Facebook released their own press release effectively saying that this a great move since the two social networking sites have been close friends over the years:

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-founder. 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.

Do you think Facebook will ever become bigger than Google since they have such experienced ex-workers with them now? Or will Google react quickly and effectively by perhaps purchasing Twitter? Please feel free to comment below

Remind you of any other social networking site?... Thought so!

 Futuristic Design attracts much attention

FriendFeed offers a different kind of service to its customers. As well as posting updates like Twitter and Facebook allow you to do, it also  is a feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from other micro-blogging services. 

People do not really pay much attention to FriendFeed until now even though it is being used by over 200 million people. The best thing about FriendFeed is that it accumulates and distrubutes lots of information to you so quickly without having to refresh your page. However, in other services like Facebook you have to refresh the page and even then there is limited information, many people refer to it as “static.”

Oh yes, that is where I saw it from!

Though Friendfeed has re-designed its site to attract the same amount of visitors as facebook. However, it has a long way to go still as there are over triple the amount of users using FriendFeed in comparison to Facebook.

Now that FriendFeed has used Facebook’s design to its advantage, inevitably it will soon take small, useful features which will be good for FriendFeed, but I wonder what Mark Zuckerberg would think!

Saying this, I still think Facebook has a long way to go until it becomes the central website on the Internet. Perhaps, if FriendFeed would possibly share their features such as “Like” which they have already done. Facebook with FriendFeed’s aid and vice-versa, they could both benefit from each others help which makes each social network so unique.

Generally, I think Social Networking as a whole is going in the right direction, they are using each others findings well and soon this category will be people’s homepages as well the world’s number one site, perhaps even in front of the mighty Google or Yahoo!