Huge news in the world of social media today: Facebook has acquired online activity aggregator FriendFeed. According to the release, "all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams."
To-date, FriendFeed has served as an inspiration for many Facebook features (to say the least), adding the ability for users to import activities from third party services like YouTube, Flickr, and Del.icio.us, plus features like commenting and "liking" items in user feeds. However, though much-hyped in early adopter circles, traffic at FriendFeed has remained more or less flat this year, while Facebook and Twitter have exploded in popularity. While Facebook indicates that FriendFeed's storied team will be joining the world's top social networking site, it's unclear what exactly the future holds for the product. On FriendFeed's blog, co-founder Bret Taylor is rather coy, writing only that "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team." Combined with the significant overlap between the two products, what exactly will remain of the FriendFeed we know today is at this point still very much in question.
The full release from Facebook is below:
Uno de los portales más visitados del mundo, Facebook (''f''), ha anunciado la compra de la red social de Internet Friendfeed (''ff'') por un monto que no ha sido publicado a los medios. Esta compra fusionará los servicios y plataformas de ambos sitios sociales; los empleados de ''ff'' serán reasignados dentro la estructura administrativa de Facebook y los cuatro fundadores ocuparán cargos ejecutivos dentro de la compañía.

Friendfeed siempre fue una fuente de inspiración para los sitios sociales, ya que integró varias de las funcionalidades que Facebook imitaba, pero la notoriedad de twitter y Facebook motivaron a los ejecutivos a vender la compañía y asegurar un puesto dentro de la organización.

Según un comunicado de prensa, el sitio de Friendfeed seguirá operando normalmente, pero se desconoce el tiempo en el que se mantendrá activo, aunque se presume será hasta que la fusión de contenidos y usuarios sea total.