Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed
PALO ALTO, Calif. — August 10, 2009 — 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-founders. 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.
Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.
About Facebook
Founded in February 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.
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.