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Facebook to acquire FriendFeed

Facebook said today that it will acquire FriendFeed for an undisclosed amount. As part of the agreement, all 12 employees will join Facebook and the company's founders will take on senior roles in Facebook's engineering and product teams.
Written by Sam Diaz, Inactive

Facebook said today that it will acquire FriendFeed for an undisclosed amount. As part of the agreement, all 12 employees will join Facebook and the company's founders will take on senior roles in Facebook's engineering and product teams. (Techmeme)

In a statement, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit said:

As we spent time with Mark (Zuckerberg) and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built and their desire to have us contribute to it. 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.

In a post on the FriendFeed blog, the company said that the FriendFeed site and service will continue to operate normally and that longer-term plans for the product as part of Facebook are still being figured out. Likewise, the company said the FriendFeed API will also continue to operate normally.

It shouldn't come as a major surprise that these two companies would join forces. After all, there's a lot of overlap between the two, though FriendFeed is one-up on Facebook with the real-time updates, compared to the Facebook updates that need to be refreshed. And really, how many friend update services do we really need?

In the end, it seems like Facebook gains some cool features but, more importantly, a great engineering team that has its roots in Google and some of that company's most popular features, including Gmail and Google Maps.

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