Facebook bought Friendfeed for an undisclosed amount of money. Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed was started by co-founders Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor and Sanjeev Singh, all ex-Googlers, and raised $5 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital and its founders. Facebook is said to have paid up to $50 million for the company – $20 million in cash and rest in stock.
The question is, why does Facebook want Friendfeed?
No, this deal is not about Twitter. It is about Google — to be more precise: Google vs. Facebook.
The reason behind the deal is twofold: ability to publish more and more information in real time and the resulting explosion of data on the web. These two trends will soon make it nearly impossible to deal with the resulting information overload. As a result, the current seek-search-consume popularized by Google will eventually hit its outer limits — and when that happens…
In 303’s last blog (http://303digital.blogspot.com/2009/08/content-is-king-but-who-is-going-to-pay.html), content creation, distribution and consumption are amid a sea change. Whether it’s photos, videos, tweets, status updates or whatever…the content is getting constantly atomized. In order to consume it all, we need to find smarter tools for content consumption. FriendFeed is one of them.
If you look at the rapidity with which many of us are uploading information on Facebook — 1 billion photos a month, a billion pieces of content shared every week, 30 status updates a day — you know that the problem of plenty is only going to get worse.
The good news is that Facebook bought a solid team to solve this problem.
The FriendFeed team — ex-Google programming rock stars — just out-executed Facebook and kept launching new features at a breathtaking pace.
FriendFeed’s unique ability is to foster conversations — not a massive user base. If Facebook can take this capacity to “converse” and marry it to its mobile clients, what the company will have on its hands is a true interaction platform, befitting today’s always-connected life. This will give it a further boost against Twitter, a small, but fast-growing, micro-messaging company.
FriendFeed has built a real-time information aggregation platform that is impressive, to say the least. Facebook’s news stream will benefit from FriendFeed’s real-time expertise.
Facebook, after having copied so many of FriendFeed’s features, buying it was the right thing to do.
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