Facebook has just signed the acquisition 10 hours ago, rocking the social media world. According to Wall Street Journal, Facebook paid close to $50 million to acquire FriendFeed with a combination of $15 million cash and $32.5 million in Facebook stock (according to recent valuation).
FriendFeed users are shocked by this sudden release but be rest assured that this agreement was not on impulse. Acquisition talks started back in October 2007, a short 2 weeks after FriendFeed’s launch!
We could consider it love at first sight. So what did Facebook see in FriendFeed? In Facebook’s release, it’s the team and technology that Facebook admires. If you have tried FriendFeed yourself, you would probably understand why. The whole FriendFeed team is joining Facebook and with the Facebook team, they are excited about the coming journey together.
Full Facebook’s release below:
Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed
Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.
“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “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 around the world.”
“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”
Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.
“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”
FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.
