Online entrepreneur believes at social network Website still very beneficial and fast-growing on Internet business area, proved that Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, said it will buy FriendFeed. FriendFeed, an up-and-coming social media startup, lets people share content online in real time across various social networks and blogs.
The service is similar to Twitter, but some analyst said that less popular than Twitter, the microblogging site that Facebook tried to buy for $500 million in 2008. FriendFeed works like an RSS reader for social media content, pulling in and publishing feeds from more than 60 Web sites, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube for easy skimming. Terms of the deal were not disclosed on Monday, but Facebook said FriendFeed would operate as it has for the time being as the teams determine long-term plans.
Jeremiah Owyang a Forrester Research analyst said Facebook’s big gain in the acquisition is the engineering talent at FriendFeed, rather than the actual product, which has won critical praise, but lagged in popularity compared to Twitter.”These guys now how to build scalable, social applications,” said Owyang.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he admired the FriendFeed team for having created a service he described as simple and elegant, he 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,” said Zuckerberg.
It’s a logical fit for Facebook, which has slowly been shifting its focus to becoming more of a real-time social broadcasting service, but the bigger win for Facebook may be the technical talent that comes with the deal with FriendFeed’s founders, were involved in the creation of Google’s Gmail service.
Elliot Schrage, Facebook spokesman said the entire FriendFeed staff of 12 will migrate over to Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto, Calif. The four FriendFeed founders will transition into senior engineering roles at Facebook, but the two companies are still ironing out the remaining details of the integration. For the time being, FriendFeed will remain fully operational as a standalone service.
Facebook has more than 250 million registered users. In May, the social networking company announced a $200 million investment from Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies that pegged the value of its preferred shares at $10 billion and Facebook has said its revenue is on track to rise 70 percent this year, and board member Mark Andreessen has said the company will bring in more than $500 million in revenue in 2009. Company hope more increase profits after all its will work.
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