The announcement fell yesterday: Facebook acquires FriendFeed for a value of 50 million US dollars, including 15 million in cash and the rest in Facebook participation. A bit pricey for a site that only raised $5 million in funding in 2008 and generates around 1 million unique visitors per month. It remains that it is one of the main social network acquisitions that could change the leadership of innovation on the Internet. For those who don't know, Friendfeed is an aggregator of updates from major social networks founded by the creators of Gmail and Google Maps.
It is known that Facebook has “borrowed” certain features from FriendFeed such as the ability to like (read “ like ” ) an item or a conversation as well as the integration of content from other social networks. In an interview with TechCrunch , the leaders of the 2 companies mentioned that the main reason for the agreement is essentially talent acquisition (12 employees) but that the 2 products will operate independently. By bringing seasoned people to its team, Facebook could battle with big players Google and MicroHoo and hope for controlled growth. As Jeremiah Owyang tweeted : IBM is afraid of Microsoft who is afraid of Google who is afraid of Facebook who is afraid of Twitter who is afraid of whales.
RWW explains 5 improvements that the friendfeed team could make to the interactivity of Facebook members, in particular to deepen the "like" functionality as an facilitator in the discovery of new friends, a powerful search engine in real time and an update platform superior to Twitter. So expect several improvements on Facebook in the coming months. Additionally, and as reported by Mashable , Facebook made this acquisition coincide with the release of its real-time search engine. I've already talked about the upcoming search war between Google and Twitter. I had not considered Facebook in the portrait. Does Facebook want to kill Twitter? Did the failure of the agreement leave a bitter taste in his mouth to the point of wanting to attack Twitter's main strength. If we include the agreement between Microsoft and Yahoo (see Marc-Antoine's post on this subject ), I believe that Google will intensify the rounds of negotiations with Twitter and will do everything to acquire it. The web will therefore be played between three players: Google, Microsoft and Facebook. In this context of domination, I leave you with an excellent pastiche of Downfall on the acquisition of Friendfeed.
