Facebook acquires content aggregator FriendFeed

Social networking giant Facebook has acquired social media feed FriendFeed, an online service that allows users to update several different social profiles at one time.

The news comes as Facebook launched a real-time search function on its website, in an effort to combat Twitter’s dominance in real-time search capability.

Facebook reportedly paid nearly $US50 million for the acquisition, including $US15 million in cash and about $US32.5 million stock, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Facebook said in a statement that FriendFeed’s 12 employees will join the Facebook team, and that the company’s founders will be given senior positions on Facebook engineering and product teams.

FriendFeed’s founders, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh and Bret Taylor, are all former Google employees, and were involved in the launch of popular features including Gmail and Google Maps.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” Facebook founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. “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.”

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor. “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.”

FriendFeed aggregates content from social networking sites including Blogger sites, Twitter and Flickr. But Facebook has said it doesn’t want to disrupt FriendFeed’s main services.

“The basic idea is that Facebook doesn’t want to disrupt the product…they’ll take a lot of ideas that work well on FriendFeed and see how they apply to Facebook, and over time they’ll look at how to integrate the products,” Bret Taylor told TechCrunch.

The deal comes as Facebook launches a search-function on its site that allows users to search within other users’ updates, similar to features seen on social networking rival Twitter.