Although FriendFeeds’ traffic has flattened over the past few months, the user base is very loyal and seemingly drawn to FriendFeeds bipartisan approach to social networks.
This acquisition might make FriendFeed users “not very happy”!
Full Press Release Below
However, over the 12 months, Facebook has been very active at implementing features that originated with FriendFreed. For example, the “Like” function originated with FriendFeed and is now being utilized by Facebook, as well as the real-time news updates.
As stated in the news release, Facebook’s engineers desire to create simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share information, and this is where FriendFeed fits in nicely into Facebook!
Mark Zuchenberger, Facebook founder and CEO of Facebook, states in the news release:
“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information. 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.”
Read the entire news release here and also read it below in its entirety:
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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.
About Facebook
Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.