Facebook drafts FriendFeed in its war against Twitter

Posted Aug 11th 2009 8:20AM by Tom Taulli
Filed under: Deals, Google (GOOG)

Facebook, the world's largest social network with over 250 million users, agreed to acquire FriendFeed yesterday. The rumor is that the price tag was about $50 million or so.

For the most part, Facebook has avoided acquisitions. The only one was for Parakey, a couple years ago. The main purpose was to get two top programmers who worked on the highly popular Firefox browser.

Interestingly enough, this "talent grab" seems to be a key to the FriendFeed deal. The 12 person team is quite impressive. For example, Paul Buchheit was the mastermind behind Gmail and even ginned up the phrase "Don't be evil". Other former Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) veterans include Jim Norris, Bret Taylor and Sanjeev Singh.

The team has been highly productive. With a decent amount of venture capital -- $5 million – the company has been able to develop a cool service that aggregates content from more than 60 websites (like Flickr and Twitter). Users can easily share, search, filter and comment on the content. So far, it is more robust than Facebook's news feeds.

Ultimately, this looks like a way to put pressure on Twitter, which has the lead in real-web content. Funny enough, Facebook tried to buy the website recently but there was a dispute over the valuation.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including The IPO Primer and The Complete M&A Handbook.

Tags: Facebook, featured, FriendFeed, Twitter

Print this

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

8-14-2009 @ 3:19PM

John B. said...

Its quite likely that Friend Feed's technology will be folded into Facebook and the FriendFeed site whittle. You should take a look at www.arktan.com for a feature rich and vibrant alternative.