Facebook buys Friendfeed (A Friend in need...)

Well, someone had to - its not as if they were going anywhere, and its a Darwinian world out there, those that don't succeed get eaten. To be fair to Friendfeed, this whole area is in such early days and experimentation is still so rife, there will be many unsuccessful models and evolutionary dead ends. An earlier example of this that comes to mind is early aircraft, lots of weird and wacky combinations of props, wings, rudders etc were tried until a few basic structures won through (see the Bleriot replica flying the channel above, which settled the arrangement of aircraft for 50 odd years), the rest fed their DNA into that process. Being picked up by Facebook is a respectable end.

(It reinforces the Web 2.0 business model too - sell to someone big before it becomes clear you are an evolutionary dead end....)

The terms of the deal have not been made public*, but I'd suspect a predominantly stock for stock deal with a consideration for FriendFeeds' principals, its probably more about grabbing some talent on an earnout leash (and killing a small-cap competitor plus maybe grabbing some remaining cash as well). As CNET notes:

The release from Facebook repeatedly hinted that this is about talent more than product.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the statement. "As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

What he said....... also, there are quite a few bits of FriendFeed that can be integrated to Facebook to give new services, it will be interesting to see how they play it (my money is on slow strangulation). We also await the inevitable "Twitter Killer"etc stuff with some mild distaste......its more like Facebook is becoming a member of the GYM club and buying in its innovation now.

* Update - WSJ says that the financials are:

"Facebook Inc. said it has acquired FriendFeed, a start-up that allows users to share links and status updates online, folding in a potential rival that struggled to take off. Facebook paid nearly $50 million for the company, in a combination cash and stock offer, according to people familiar with the matter. The company paid roughly $15 million in cash, with the rest in Facebook stock that vests over several years and would be valued roughly at $32.5 million."

$15m consideration - nice one - lets see what the earnout is!