Saturday, August 15, 2009

Facebook buys FriendFeed: So what?

 This week Facebook acquired FriendFeed, a Bay Area-based social-network feed aggregation start-up.    Over the years the service has earned praise from prominent voices in Silicon Valley, but its aim to aggregate all of a user's social-networking activity feeds in one place didn't catch on with the mainstream. However, Facebook eventually began to mimic the FriendFeed model through upgrades to its central "news feed" feature, letting members pull in select third-party updates, making the two companies closer to sharing the same vision than Facebook may have led on.    I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not as ridiculously huge of a deal as the Silicon Valley hype machine is going to have you believe.
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August 15, 2009
Facebook buys FriendFeed: Is this a big deal?

This week Facebook acquired FriendFeed, a Bay Area-based social-network feed aggregation start-up.

Over the years the service has earned praise from prominent voices in Silicon Valley, but its aim to aggregate all of a user's social-networking activity feeds in one place didn't catch on with the mainstream. However, Facebook eventually began to mimic the FriendFeed model through upgrades to its central "news feed" feature, letting members pull in select third-party updates, making the two companies closer to sharing the same vision than Facebook may have led on.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not as ridiculously huge of a deal as the Silicon Valley hype machine is going to have you believe.


Read more

 FriendFeed features that Facebook needs to absorb
 Facebook gets Twitter-like search
Caroline McCarthy
Caroline McCarthy
CNET.com
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