Social networking site Facebook has recently announced the purchase of social media firm Friendfeed for a reported £30.3m.
For those who are unaware of what Friendfeed has to offer; Friendfeed is a social news feed aggregator, which pulls updates from social media sites, social networking sites, blogs etc in real-time. This allows the user to share content, make comments and see what their friends are doing across all media platforms on one website.
The Real-Time property of Friendfeed appeals enormously to Facebook as it allows for them to compete with the front runner Twitter, in Real-Time search capabilities. This coincidently comes not long after Facebook’s failed attempt to close a deal to buy rival Twitter in November last year for £303m. By having efficient real-time facilities included within Facebook, Facebook will have a large enough presence on the internet to be classed in the same league as websites such as Google. As Google has not yet developed a Real-Time search facility of its own, it will be interesting to see how Google respond to Facebook’s new venture.
A career at Facebook awaits the 12 employees of Friendfeed, along with the 4 founders of the site, all of whom are ex-Google engineers, who will be taking senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
One of the four founders at FriendFeed, Paul Buchheit, explained that “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.”