Facebook buys FriendFeed for wider web coverage

Bangalore: Facebook has made its most significant acquisition till date by announcing to buy social sharing service FriendFeed and its Google seasoned team in its efforts to embed itself widely to the web. As both companies are privately held, terms of the deal were not released.

The announcement has come after Facebook's last year's attempt to buy Twitter for $500 million, as the deal had failed.

FriendFeed allows the users to share content and links with a group of followers in real time and broadcast that information across other social networks and blogs. According to analytics firm Compete, it has about one million monthly visitors.

Both Facebook and Twitter have the same features as FriendFeed, by trying to develop real time search capabilities and share content more widely.

In March, Facebook had redesigned its homepage with a real time news feed in the centre, matching much of FriendFeed's functionality.

"Over the past year and a half we felt our products and visions were evolving together, we really were thinking about these problems in the same way," said Bret Taylor, Co-founder, FriendFeed.

"We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users," added Taylor.

FriendFeed's technology for sharing and distributing online content will help Facebook to scale its growing service and integrate with more sites around the web.

"Facebook is evolving into a service, not just the destination Facebook.com, FriendFeed has been addressing these problems from day one," said Chris Cox, Director of Product, Facebook.

FriendFeed was founded in 2007 with $5 million in funding from its founders and Benchmark Capital, and is widely admired among Silicon Valley techies for developing an API (Application Programming Interface), which enables users to easily share information found on the web.

A report by comScore has defined Facebook's traffic surpassing eBay and Wikipedia, ranking fourth behind sites owned by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft.

Facebook and Google are in a race over talent, as several Google veterans have joined Facebook in recent years, including Sheryl Sandberg as the Chief Operating Officer.