3 Key Reasons Facebook Bought FriendFeed

3 Key Reasons Facebook Bought FriendFeed

Facebook buys Friendfeed, and Mashable takes a stab at three reasons it’s a great deal.

Facebook, one of the leaders in online social networking, today purchased Friendfeed.  The sum was undisclosed as well as the future of the Friendfeed staff. Why buy now?  It turns out that the desire has been there for some time.

Is it good for you? That remains to be seen.  Facebook is likely to become even more of an integration and central sharing tool.  Browser integrated sharing, already part of Facebook’s schema would seem an easy upgrade point and one the everyday user will use.

Another good possibility will be borrowing some of Frienfeed’s built in display of items instead of taking the user out of the Facebook interface.

In any case…

The full release from Facebook is below:

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

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-founder. 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.

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Tags: acquisition, Bret Taylor, Facebook, Friendfeed, Google, Paul Buchheit, Social network service, Social Networking, social networks