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Facebook is going to acquire a Web service called FriendFeed. This service will allow users to view what their friends are doing on all sorts of social media sites, including Facebook's rivals.
Bret Taylor, co-founder of FriendFeed said in an interview that the two services will eventually merge, though FriendFeed will operate separately for the time being. He said with this merger, they can reach a major part of the world. Facebook has around 250 million users.
"Facebook has a really unique opportunity for our team to reach a significant percentage of the world, and that was an opportunity I think everyone on our team was extremely excited about," he said.
Facebook said that all 12 employees of Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed will then work for Facebook. Its headquarters is nearby in Palo Alto. Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh, the four founders of Facebook will work on senior positions in the engineering and product teams at Facebook.
Facebook’s plans with its inclusion of FriendFeed is still unclear. The new web service concentrates on aggregating information from online destinations like short-messaging site Twitter, review site Yelp and photo-sharing site Flickr.
Ray Valdes, Gartner Inc. analyst said that the acquisition of FriendFeed would help Facebook open up its site and enhance features with more real time information.
Ray Valdes said "They needed to do something to meet the Twitter challenge,"
Facebook's vice president of products, Chris Cox said both the companies had been talking about the merger for some time. They both were working on solving the same problems such as connecting people with one another over time, how to make these connections work on various devices and how to filter information through friends.
He said,"I think both companies start with the premise that the most valuable information in the world is the one that comes from the people you care about. Building technologies that leverage those relationships everywhere you go is where we're both starting from."
Cox did not reveal if Facebook was planning to incorporate Friend Feed’s real-time search capability into its site. He said that Facebook has already been testing real-time search and was impressed with that of FriendFeed.
The financial terms of the merger were also not disclosed.
