Facebook is buying a Web service called FriendFeed that gives users a view of what their friends are doing on all sorts of social media sites, including Facebook’s rivals.
In an interview, FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor said the two services would eventually merge, though FriendFeed will operate separately for now.
USER BASE
Taylor said FriendFeed was drawn to Facebook’s much larger base of 250 million users.
“Facebook has a really unique opportunity for our team to reach a significant percentage of the world, and that was an opportunity I think everyone on our team was extremely excited about,” he said.
“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,” said Taylor, previously the group product manager who launched Google Maps.
Facebook said all 12 employees of Mountain View, California-based FriendFeed will work for Facebook, whose headquarters is nearby in Palo Alto, California.
FriendFeed’s four founders — Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh — will take on senior positions on the engineering and product teams at Facebook.
PLANS
It remains unclear what exactly Facebook plans to do with FriendFeed, which centers around the idea of instantaneously aggregating information from online destinations like short-messaging site Twitter, review site Yelp and photo-sharing site Flickr.
Gartner Inc analyst Ray Valdes said the FriendFeed acquisition should help Facebook open up its site and boost features that show users more information in real time.
“They needed to do something to meet the Twitter challenge,” he said, referring to the messaging site that has shown the type of buzz Facebook once enjoyed.
PROBLEMS
Chris Cox, Facebook vice president of products, said the companies had been talking about a combination for some time, as they’re both working on solving the same problems:
How to help people connect with one another over time, how to make these connections work on various devices and how to filter information through friends.
“I think both companies start with the premise that the most valuable information in the world is the one that comes from the people you care about,” he said. “Building technologies that leverage those relationships everywhere you go is where we’re both starting from.”
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