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by Rick Martin, Japan

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Facebook acquires FriendFeed: Does it make sense?

Aug 11, 2009 04:45

Breaking news coming this morning in that Facebook has taken the plunge and acquired Friendfeed:

Facebook agrees to acquire sharing service FriendFeed

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 (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."

When Facebook rolled out its new layout back in March, it was pretty obvious that it was influenced by Twitter. But as invincible as Facebook is right now, I'm not especially impressed by "me-too!" strategy in any industry. It just looks like a natural move for Facebook to absorb the next-best Twitter.

Whatever the case, I suspect this may spell the beginning of the end for FriendFeed.com. Does Facebook care about propping up a microblog-ish service that seems to have already hit its peak? I'm sure Zuckerberg and company are far more concerned with bringing in some of that sexy real-time mojo and rubbing it all over their own timeline.

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papadimitriou

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papadimitriou says...
Consolidation is in the air. Friendfeed never got mainstream and did not even grab all the early adopter geek crowd. It was a matter of time.

I somewhat doubt that the service will be able to maintain itself as is (even without updates) mid-term.

Now, does it make sense for Facebook? I guess they're feeling that the future is in crowd-searching and they have a hunch that the FriendFeed team has a good clue about this technology. I personally hope to see some of FriendFeed livestreaming tech ported to the Fan Pages (the semantics behind 'Fan' is not perfect, I know, Rick ^^), as they might become the non-reciprocate profile model for Facebook.

We'll see I guess

Aug 11, 2009 14:37

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RickMartin

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RickMartin says...
There's definitely massive search potential. But I don't know if it's nearly as rich as the twitter search experience. The two user bases are vastly different. Facebook has EVERYBODY, while Twitter has a community of slightly more internet saavy users more prone to share valuable links with each other.

Aug 11, 2009 18:08

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papadimitriou

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papadimitriou says...
Well, FriendFeed had only very early adopters, so the search was even more useful ^^

While I love that granularity, it is momentary, not set in stone. Twitter might never get as many users as FB, but it will expand, thus diffusing that community you mention.

Just look at the current Twitter trending topics...

Aug 12, 2009 11:24

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About Rick Martin

After a few years in China studying Mandarin and watching the Chinese Tech scene, Rick Martin has escaped to Japan and is loving every minute of it. When he's not working on his pet projects, 2JPN and DS Ninja, he can usually be found exploring all things tech in the land of the rising sun. Drop him a line on Twitter, Facebook, or contact him via Email.