Well today Facebook announced that during the night it had aquired FriendFeed for $50 million dollars. This seems like a good fit considering that Facebook have been replicated some of the functions in Friendfeed such as the “like” feature. The main benefit to facebook is not so much friendfeed but the people behind it such as Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. The acquisition composed of $15 million in cash and the rest in stock options.
Friendfeed founder Bret Taylor says:
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 and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.
Facebook’s statement notes that:
“As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.”
Some people had suggested that FriendFeed’s user growth was dead but according to Hitwise UK, uk traffic to the site had increased 180% in the past 12 months as show by the graph below:
Today I was doing some grocery shopping and they happened to have a book stand beside the till in Eurospar of all places, probably for those impulse buys! Guess what it worked! I saw they had a copy of The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. I remember reading about The Accidental Billionaires a couple of months ago on CNET.com, it’s the story about the founding of Facebook that they are turning into a film. Being the geek that I am, I had to pick myself up a copy.
Although some of the reviews on cnet.com stated that a lot of the story is ficticious and unsubstatiated, I’m looking forward to the read.
Sometimes its good to get away from the computer for a while and chill out. I’ll let you know how the book turns out!
Let me start off by stating that this is a new blog, it’s been up a little over a week. Since it’s a new blog which we havent actively promoted it yet so our traffic is quite low around about 20 uniques a day.
You can imagine my surprise last week when I logged into Google Analytics and seen that the sites traffic had jumped over 500% in one nite to 130 uniques.
Blogging about topical trends or events can have a huge influence over your traffic. So if there is an upcoming event for your niche, even if your not going to it, blog about it.
Let me know if you’ve had any similar situations on your blog in the comments.
If you haven’t heard yet, which is virtually impossible because it’s all over the internet, starting on 13 June, at 05:01 (New York Time), you’ll be able to choose a username for your Facebook account.
So What Does This Mean For Me?
Basically it means you will be able to get a nice looking search engine friendly url like
www.facebook.com/leofogarty
or
www.facebook.com/nike
Wheres The Catch?
Well the catch is the following, to claim your personal url you had to be a member before they made this anouncement on June 9th. For any new accounts created after this date, you will have to wait until June 28th, this is to prevent url squatting.
Well today Facebook announced that during the night it had aquired FriendFeed for $50 million dollars. This seems like a good fit considering that Facebook have been replicated some of the functions in Friendfeed such as the “like” feature. The main benefit to facebook is not so much friendfeed but the people behind it such as Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. The acquisition composed of $15 million in cash and the rest in stock options.
