Facebook Buys FriendFeed - The UpStream

I haven't been using Facebook long, but I know it is the major player in social networking world. I remember a time when Friendster and mySpace were the major players, now most people don't even remember the first one. In the new world of social networking, companies like Facebook are always looking for ways to increase their market share, and the easiest way to do it is to buy the competition, and here we have another good example.

FriendFeed is a site that has been doing well as of late. It gives you the ability to combine status updates and microblogging, bringing the ideas of Facebook and Twitter together. They pioneered the idea of the "Like" button (now used on Facebook, Google Reader, etc.). They also give you the ability to combine your feeds from other sources into one place.

Obviously, this idea has a lot of potential, so the desire for Facebook to acquire them was obvious. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, said,

Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information. 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.

As of now, the future of the FriendFeed brand is unknown, but I would imagine they know what they want to do with it.