The face of social media starts to change as Facebook Buys FriendFeed

Facebook has bought social media start-up firm ‘FriendFeed’ for around £30m.

The news which co-founder and CEO of FriendFeed Bret Taylor broke himself, will see FriendFeed initially continue to operate on its own, but it is expected it will later be bundled into Facebook.

FriendFeed currently allows 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.

Facebook's 250m users puts the social networking site in the same league as Google, which has also expressed interest in launching a real-time search engine.

However, despite all of the buzz surrounding the announcement, many users of the FriendFeed community appear to be concerned about the acquisition – fearing that their site might go too mainstream or even worse, close.

That said, it is most likely the founders of Twitter will be the most ‘twitchy’ given that FriendFeed’s real time search engine is seen by many as being much stronger than theirs in terms of interface and usability. This combined with the huge user base Facebook can offer could see this new alliance become a real force in the social media world.

Only time will tell, but we’ll be keeping a close eye on developments.


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www.friendfeed.com