Facebook Acquires FriendFeed. What’s Next?

As you may have heard, Facebook acquired Friendfeed a few days ago for $50 million. That is $15m in cash and the rest in Facebook stock. FriendFeed will continue to operate normally for the time being while the two companies figure out the long-term plans.

A number of Frienfeed user’s first reactions aren’t so positive. Users fear what will happen to the service once it becomes more tightly integrated with Facebook. In an interview with Rober Scoble, FriendFeed’s Paul Buchheit stressed that the company will not just abandon its users, though he didn’t go into the company’s exact plans.

So will Friendfeed influence Facebook? Both ReadWriteWeb and TechCrunch has a great article about it.

But in summary, it could influence Facebook’s Public Profiles and Content (Social Feeds) , In-depth Conversations, Cross Group Interactions, Multiple Network Aggregation, Real Time Updates, Search, Messaging and Filtering.

Here’s Facebook’s 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.

External Related Articles:

ReadWriteWeb – Facebook Acquires FriendFeed for $50 Million

ReadWriteWeb – Facebook Users: Here’s What FriendFeed Brings to the Family

TechCrunch – First Interview After Acquisition With FriendFeed And Facebook

TechCrunch – Facebook Takes FriendFeed To Take On Twitter

CNet News – Facebook buys FriendFeed: Is this a big deal?