Facebook buys social media website FriendFeed for $50 million
12 Aug 2009
Facebook, the fourth most visited site on the web, has bought social media start-up firm FriendFeed for nearly $50 million (Rs 2,500 crore approx). Facebook will make payment in a combination of cash and stock offer.
FriendFeed was founded in October 2007 by Bret Taylor and Paul Buchheit, along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. FriendFeed was a way for users to keep track of their friends' activities across social-media services -- like Facebook and Twitter - at the same time.
"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," said Taylor, FriendFeed co-founder, adding, "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."
"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, California, 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. Facebook will continue to operate FriendFeed.com as a standalone site for now but aims to eventually integrate the products.
In the past year, Facebook has matched a number of features from FriendFeed, whose technology, including the speed at which it updates, have received strong reviews from industry professionals. FriendFeed had 9,89,000 unique users in June, according to comScore, compared with Facebook's 340 million. Facebook last year failed to acquire Twitter - a microblogging service which, like FriendFeed, enables users to share links and content online.
FriendFeed will allow people to share content, make comments and see what their friends are doing in real-time on a host of social media sites from blogs to Twitter and social book marking sites like Digg as well as RSS feeds. The acquisition further expands Facebook's real-time web capabilities, which is one of the fastest growing areas of the web, and makes up in some ways for its failure to agree a deal to buy rival Twitter last year.
Twitter had rejected an offer valued at $500 million from the social media market leader in November 2008 after the two could not agree on the value of Facebook's stock.
