I am not sure what to make from the acquisition of Friendfeed by Facebook yet. A lot of things popped into my head when I saw the first mention while breezing through TechCrunch headlines. What does Friendfeed have that Facebook doesn’t? How come FB cannot just build whatever functions they need on their own? Did they acquire marketshare? Were they just excited about adding another letter on their initials (FBF) and stop any confusion?
Jeremiah’s opinion is that the acquisition was mostly about acquiring talent, ex-Googlers with great experience in building scalable social apps (Facebook Acquires Social Veterans in FriendFeed Deal – Jeremiah Owyang), which I can totally see. But it still seems both platforms will still have some issues which still does make complete sense to me. That is, not all social networks work with each other, socially-speaking (insert PUN here).
Another good post on the acquisition, Facefeed: Why Facebook Acquired FriendFeed follow the same idea, acquiring talent (also a great questions on FMAIL, didnt even think of that myself). They also touch on the idea of directly targeting Google and Twitter. While I also do agree with this being a long-term focus, because of all of the steam Twitter has been riding lately, I wonder how much any acquisition could affect them right now, of course aside from the newly formed FacebookFeed acquiring them themselves.
I see Friendfeed most likely disappearing and all of its functionality being rolled into a bigger, more robust super Facebook. So, the question is, eventually will FF become FB or will FB become FF?
I don’t know exactly why, but I never jumped on the Friendfeed wagon, I have an account, worked on setting it all up and linking in other accounts, but at the end of the day it was just easier for me to not use it. I could also say that Facebook in general is very much a social, keep in touch with friends and family site with a splash of business promotion or advertising here and there… but for big companies, LinkedIn is where we spend our time. Not saying I do not go on Facebook and engage on there, just from the amount of activity and conversations around business topics, LinkedIn is the place.
I am sure I will comment more on this over the next couple of days. Until then I only used the letter F (including this one) 41 times.
