I just got off the phone with Mike Schroepfer of Facebook and Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed to discuss their acquisition. As you’ve probably read elsewhere, the companies are being relatively tight lipped about information surrounding the acquisition but I thought I’d take the opportunity to discuss why Facebook would make such an acquisition. Before discussing the logic behind Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed, I wanted to note that I asked Paul Buchheit (who was the the creator of GMail) if he’d be developing FMail and he said “Not that I’m aware of!”
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Facebook has announced this afternoon the acquisition of FriendFeed. For those unaware of the FriendFeed service, it enables users to publish stories just as Facebook does with feeds imported from around the web and open APIs for all information passing through the system. One interesting note about FriendFeed is the team’s remarkable ability to scale their application effectively without error.
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Last month I wrote that Facebook was preparing to launch a “Like” feature similar to the one currently provided on FriendFeed. Today, the company finally announced the launch of that feature. The main purpose of the feature is to avoid excessive comments from users saying “I agree” or “I like this”, etc.
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Last week we published a video that Facebook had posted describing how to publish feed stories with Facebook Connect. Today one of our readers, Amin Issa, posted an interesting observation from the video: the addition of the word “Like” which was hyperlinked. This is appears to be a duplicate of FriendFeed’s popular “like” feature.
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