So for me this was not a huge shock (someone was going to buy them sooner or later) but a possible detremental decision for the users of FriendFeed. For Facebook this is a big move and a good one to boot, they have identified the power of realtime search and bought the best company in that particular area. There is nothing close to FriendFeed’s tech for realtime updating or search at the moment. Facebook will definately be able to capitalise on this.

The larger issue that bugs me is what will happen to Friendfeed, in the short term the CEO’s of both companies say that nothing major will change, but that they are working on a roadmap for the future of both services. Paul Buchheit (co founder of FriendFeed) told Robert Scoble in an interview that he and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, “are on the same wavelength”.

In essence Friendfeed is dead, the dev team will be much more effective on getting realtime search to work for the 300 million users Facebook has, the faster thay do that the better. It may happen a few years down the line from now but in reality Friendfeed will be assimilated like a new borg entity into the collective that is Facebook (sorry that was uber geeky).

Almalgamating the FriendFeed users into Facebook is a big issue that the team will need to overcome. I use FriendFeed for news and info, Facebook is for me about keeping in touch with contacts and friends. I like these two things being seperate and cannot see a seemless way to link them together.

To be honest Facebook gets and epic win on this deal, the guys at FriendFeed do too (they get jobs with Facebook and a load of cash) but the users of FriendFeed lose out big time.

What’s your thoughts

A