Facebook Took Over FriendFeed

On August 10, 2009, Facebook stated before media in a press release that it has acquired FriendFeed. FriendFeed is basically used for sharing and offers real time updates as similar to Twitter. With this acquisition now all the employees of FriendFeed will work for Facebook along with that it will give senior positions to the founders of FriendFeed. Facebook is much known in the market as compared to Friendfeed. To be acquired by the Facebook is very much favorable for Friendfeed because Friendfeed has very less number of users. They are very much excited because they are going to become the part of a big group now. Both the companies have the same vision. Since the last year friendfeed has been introducing many new features in social networking. Some of them are also borrowed by the Facebook For Example the ‘Like’ feature. People can comment on status updates and topics on Friendfeed so it acts like a forum. There fore, it has many of great features. Hence, what is the actual acquisition price? The estimated price is about $50M out of which $15m is paid in cash and the remaining will be settled through Facebook’s stock.

Both the parties will influence each other a lot. FriendFeed showed interest in this acquisition because the Facebook has above 250 million users but why Facebook showed their interest. The reason is Facebook’s News Feed because it was not as good as the social stream of FriendFeed. Therefore, Facebook with the team of Friendfeed will try to integrate the best features of FriendFeed. Also, it is in front of all that how speedily the Friendfeed was growing! These things gained the attention of Facebook that’s why they prefer to acquire it as compared to Twitter and now will try to beat Twitter with the help of this new team. This entire team is very efficient as it comes from Google and they took part in the development of Gmail.

Facebook made a very wise decision of acquisition because it relates to the real-time web. In order to compete the Twitter, Facebook should be simpler. What will happen to FriendFeed? Their team said it will remain run for the time being but no guarantee for future because their most of the time will be consumed in the development of Facebook. This is the reason that many of the Friendfeed user’s are not happy with this decision because they are afraid of the fact that after integration with Facebook, Facebook will get dominancy and this service might get close.

However, with this new team, it is expected that Facebook will be changed a lot and bring more innovations. As all know that Facebook wanted to buy Twitter but Terms were not set as Twitter was not agree. But with this acquisition we can say that Facebook made a better decision to buy FriendFeed because it has a fantastic team.