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Business News Deals Digital
Facebook buying FriendFeed
By CMU Editorial | Published on Wednesday 12 August 2009
Facebook have said they will buy FriendFeed, which, for the uninitiated, is “a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/Atom feed” (thanks to Wikipedia for the description). In fact I’d say it was my favourite real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/Atom feed.
There are similarities between FriendFeed and Twitter, except my Mum has heard of the latter, of course. Facebook tried to acquire Twitter last year, and the FriendFeed deal – specifics of which are unknown – is a sign that the still dominant social networking website is keen to diversify into those newer areas of the web which could become a threat to more traditional kinds of social networking and online information sharing (if anything to do with the web can be considered “more traditional”).
That said, insiders say Facebook are actually more interested in acquiring the techy talent that exists inside FriendFeed than the infrastructure they have already built, it having been an undeniable influence on many of Facebook’s newer features.
