The news is everywhere, Facebook has agreed to acquire Friendfeed for reportedly $50 million, and with it have set blog-tongues wagging on what the deal means for the social web. The Facebook announcement would suggest that the primary reason for the acquisition is the knowledge that the talented guys at Friendfeed hold – the guys behind FF made Gmail and Google maps after all. However its impact is felt at multiple points. The deal is stock and cash with the Friendfeed guys getting $15 million in cash and $32.5 million in Facebook (Facebook) stock.
The primary benefit Facebook seems to get out of this deal is bettering its search. Facebook has been amongst the few networks which has a reputation for being a bad point for search, while Friendfeed on the other hand has almost pioneered real time search. And for that reason the biggest noise has been on the fact that the acquisition is Facebook’s biggest weapon against Twitter. Twitter on the other hand as we all know has been trying to up its ante against Google and showcase itself as the primary real time search tool (going by its recent home page redesign).
The initial talks suggest that Facebook can now provide users the ability to search statuses which Friendfeed offered as a primary service earlier. Another important aspect why the match is proper is because both Friendfeed and Facebook seem to hold a similar philosophy of aggregating rather than dispelling information and conversations. Threaded convos through comments, replies and likes have kept activity levels high for Facebook and Friendfeed in their respective homes earlier. This is something Twitter sorely lacks and will perhaps never meet the way it is headed, it isn’t coded to be so.
So what Twitter with its API’s and millions of apps and Google with open Social and Friendconnect tries to do, Facebook now hopes to emulate with Friendfeed under its arm (to go with FB connect and Fanboxes). The effort all these names are attempting is to be the name when it comes to real time data fed by the people. And this is where Friendfeed serves Facebook best, it has a distinct advantage of collecting data from nearly 58 services. That means there is a distinct possibility of FB being the new aggregator to whatever one does on sites like Digg, Mixx, Delicious, Twitter, etc. And thus extend its social graph without banking on existing users.
For Friendfeed of course this is an excellent move, because for allt hat was good going on there, it never attracted enough traction. In fact it hasn’t touched a million in traffic while Facebook on the other hand drew 54 million in the same period. It made sense to align than become another almost happened story.
