Facebook buys FriendFeed amid competition with Twitter

TORONTO – Facebook’s friend list just got a little bit longer.

On Monday, the world’s largest social network announced it had agreed to acquire FriendFeed, a social network founded by former Google employees in October 2007.

Financial terms of the agreement were not revealed.

FriendFeed is an all-purpose social network sharing site that draws information from a variety of web sources and allows users to post about everything they’re doing online, from updating their Facebook status, to uploading Flickr photos, and posting YouTube videos. Users can subscribe to receive updates about their friends’ profiles and can send their own updates to their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

Although it remains to be seen what Facebook’s long-term integration plans are for FriendFeed – FriendFeed’s founders said the site will continue to function normally on its own for the time-being – it would seem logical that Facebook sees FriendFeed’s experience with real time status updates and an open platform as a means of better competing with Twitter.

Facebook’s announcement that FriendFeed’s four founders – Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh – will take on senior roles with its engineering and product teams also likely indicates Facebook is looking to incorporate some of the sharing and real-time functions employed by FriendFeed.

FriendFeed’s founders are all ex-Google employees who worked to develop some of the search engine’s most popular services. Taylor and Norris were instrumental in creating Google Maps, while Singh and Buchheit helped engineer Google’s Gmail e-mail service.

"We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle," Taylor wrote in a blog post.

"The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online."

Facebook creator and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, admired FriendFeed’s engineers for creating "such a simple and elegant service for people to share information.

"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."