
  Facebook Acquires FriendFeed  - jasonlbaptiste
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/
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treyp
Nobody has said it, so I guess I'll go ahead -- I don't like to hear this.

I use Facebook a lot, but I think Friendfeed is such a great product and that
Facebook is such a mature site that nothing good can come of the acquisition.

The absolute best case would be that the Friendfeed talent supremely cleans up
the code at Facebook to make it a much faster site, but even that would be at
the cost of Friendfeed's development.

~~~
spencerfry
I disagree that nothing good can come of it. Friendfeed has mastered real-time
whereas Facebook still hasn't. Friendfeed can step in and clean up Facebook's
news feed and make it a lot better, which I'm sure they're going to be tasked
with doing.

~~~
treyp
which is why i said "but even that would be at the cost of Friendfeed's
development."

Friendfeed has already admitted they don't know what will happen to their
product long term now. if they disappear, that's one competitor that goes
away, which probably will mean slower innovation in social sites in general.

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mhartl
I'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's
perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy
when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary
motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the
excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an
employee at Facebook, in exchange for an amount of money that can't possibly
represent the bulk of his net worth. That doesn't seem like a particularly
good outcome to me. Does anyone know any different?

~~~
nadim
[http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-
li...](http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-life-than-
money.html)

~~~
mhartl
I remember reading that post when he wrote it. From the post:

 _That's why, even though I don't financially need to work, I choose to work
(and end up staying up until 4am pushing new code). It's why we created
FriendFeed, to have a great place to work, a place where we can build great
products and have happy users. Of course I'd also like to earn a few billion
dollars, and I plan to make all of our employees very wealthy, but that's more
like a bonus._

Rather than undermining it, I think this underscores my point. It's precisely
_because_ there's more to life than money that I'm surprised he was willing to
sell. I would have expected only a ~$1 billion price tag to tempt him.

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apgwoz
This doesn't make me happy. FriendFeed is an amazing product, and though I'm
glad that they are getting their payday for it, I hope the service doesn't get
killed off or abandoned. I'm not so much a fan of Facebook, so potentially
being forced to use it so that I can continue to use the features I love from
FriendFeed is more or less going to cause me to look somewhere else for those
features, which unfortunately is not something I'm likely to find elsewhere.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Yes, and Facebook's history in dealing with its users is prompting me to
remove my FriendFeed account now.

~~~
michaelneale
I agree - I am not at all comfortable with facebook, even though I use it, I
am very very wary... They seem to be happy to do as they feel by default.

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jacquesm
The standard 18 months ago:

[http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/facebook-acquires-
fri...](http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/facebook-acquires-friendfeed-0)

~~~
ilamont
The Prediction Market community was overwhelmingly against the idea that FB
would acquire FF -- but that was based on a 2008 timeline.

------
rythie
The problem is with so many big social graphs already on Facebook, Twitter,
MySpace etc. it's difficult to build another. They were competing against
Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Twitter is getting masses of press and
Facebook already has masses of users. FriendFeed had a good product
technically but still weren't getting there in gaining active users.

If you look at friendfeed's stats they've leveled off for the last 7 months
<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/>

FriendFeed was a technology company they know search, real-time, scaling etc.
but social networking isn't just those things. Facebook gets the interface and
it clearly works for people, but they have so far not done much with realtime,
and since it's new I expect there are very few people that have experience of
that.

To me, both sides needed this, friendfeed had stopped growing and Facebook
needs to evolve against Twitter and the trend for realtime (on the web) in
general.

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dannyr
My guess is it's a talent acquisition.

~~~
callmeed
General questions about "talent acquisitions" ... when it happens, what's to
keep the talent from leaving? Is it generally a scenario where the talent
wouldn't sell if they didn't want to stay on board–or are there also clauses
in the acquisition that actually prevent them from leaving?

~~~
aneesh
My understanding is that usually a significant part of the payout is in stock,
which will vest over a couple years.

~~~
Herring
Facebook stock? haha

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goodkarma
Wow, congrats to Paul Buchheit and the rest of the Friendfeed team!

~~~
budu3
Yep, I'm really happy for Paul. He's proven to be an astute investor and a
great founder.

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adamhowell
I think the most interesting thing about this (other than the fact that
Friendfeed sold so early) is that, I'd guess, about half the company is
already set for life from Google.

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tptacek
This is good news for me, as I use Facebook and have been a long-distance
admirer of FriendFeed with no time to actually investigate yet another new
service.

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ryanpetrich
The IT Crowd wins again:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg&feature=fvst](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg&feature=fvst)

~~~
handelaar
See also: <http://www.friendface.org>

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matt1
Any guestimates on the acquisition price?

It'll be fun to point back here if we ever find out.

~~~
webwright
Friendfeed raised $5m... I'd guess on a post-money valuation of $25m. So a
$25m exit would basically mean that the investors in the most recent round get
a 1 to 1 payout for their investment. Not a big win.

But justifying a $50+mm offer for FriendFeed seems awful hard-- so my guess is
$25-$35m.

It does get the FF investors a pile of Facebook stock which is pretty hard to
come by (but at what valuation for FB?).

OTOH, Facebook has scads of stock to give away, and at their atmospheric
valuations, buying FriendFeed for $100m in pure stock would be like trading
1/65th of Facebook ($6.5B valuation) for it...

~~~
boundlessdreamz
My guess is that deal will be somewhere around $25-30mn cash and $40mn stock.

~~~
jonknee
I doubt they used much cash. Facebook is bleeding cash and tossing around that
kind of coin for a mostly talent based acquisition doesn't make a whole lot of
sense.

------
blasdel
"Facebook buying Friendfeed is like cloning yourself, not feeding it for a few
years, and then eating it." <http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-6353.cfm>

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teamonkey
"Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details
now."

And so are they.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Data harvesting is the first thing I think of when I
hear "Facebook" these days.

------
alexandros
I was hoping it would be google that would step up to the plate, not facebook
to be honest. The friendfeed team is a serious weapon for facebook to wield
against google and I don't know why the FF guys would enter this war, on this
side. Maybe Google did something to piss them off? On the plus side, the FF
guys will now get paid for the FB dev work they have been doing anyways. If I
recall correctly buchheit was also involved in adsense, another pain point for
facebook. Also the real-time search assets that fb would get from ff may fill
the goals that facebook had with the attempted twitter acquisition.

The plot thickens...

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jgrahamc
Perfect. I managed to put off signing up for FriendFeed long enough.

~~~
oliveoil
Haha..

I am also putting off signing up for Twitter.

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nuweborder
Could the agreement by FriendFeed, to sell to Facebook have been pushed along
by the possible emergence of the supposed FriendFeed Killer by Apple, dubbed
iFriendFeed ([http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/apple-planning-some-
sup...](http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/apple-planning-some-super-secret-
social-app/))? Maybe. If so, the company may have cashed on on that $50
million just in the nick of time. But still, Facebook also benefitted from
aquiring those former Google Vets that can enhance their creative social media
service quite a bit.

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msort
I really hope friendfeed can stay independent, and grow itself into something
much bigger.

On the other hand, this should create opportunities for other social
aggregation startups.

~~~
Tiktaalik
Bigger than what? Facebook? The company that owns them?

Just close down Friendfeed now.

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intellectronica
Huh! I must admit I was secretly hoping that would happen. I hope that's more
than a recruitment round, and that Facebook will now gain all the
functionality from FriendFeed.

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vijayr
FB has always wanted Twitter, but Twitter is probably too expensive at the
moment. So it makes sense for them to buy FF. Not sure what they would do with
it though.

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jganetsk
I'm so happy. Twitter is run by a bunch of pseudo-technological hipsters. By
FB buying FF, hackers unite to face the foe!

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indiejade
Disaster.

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TweedHeads
Now there is a hole waiting to be filled... with proven value.

