Facebook has acquired content sharing platform FriendFeed for an undisclosed sum in a bid to rattle Google and Twitter.
Under the transaction FriendFeed’s four co-founders and the company’s 12 staff will join Facebook.
The founders, who all met at Google, will take on 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 FriendFeed co-founder and ex-Googler Bret Taylor.
The quartet of Silicon Valley based founders, Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh, met while working at Google and left to found the content aggregator in October 2007.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was attracted to the privately held asset due to its simplicity and elegance form a user interface perspective.
He noted however that the acquisition showed that Facebook “is a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.
"This is an 11th hour deal. FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request " admitted FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor in his blog post.
It is understood that the deal was a tightly held secret, despite the fact that the company’s had been in intermittent talks for the last two years. Industry pundits had long expected Google to acquire the company.
"Our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world," Taylor said.
