Social engineers
Already the dominant force in online social networking, Facebook will now become the leading aggregator of online social activity, having announced its agreement to acquire FriendFeed.
Just as you have to become someone's ‘friend' so see what they're up to on Facebook and you have to ‘follow' someone's Twitter feed to read what they're tweeting about, if you subscribe to someone's FriendFeed, you get to see every single thing they've done online, as long as it is done using one of the services below.
The founders of FriendFeed all came from Google, including Bret Taylor, who was the group product manager behind Google Maps. "Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," 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."
The other ex-Googlers that will now hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams are Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh and Paul Buchheit - the latter claiming to have created the inane Google motto: "Don't be evil".
Friendfeed has a 'realtime' search engine, allowing you to search for items posted very recently, and the real significance of this deal could be to create the default search engine for social media, just as Google is for websites and blogs. However, Twitter also has a search engine and Google is unlikely to just sit back and let that happen.
The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the WSJ reckons Facebook paid around $50 million for FriendFeed.