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Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
- dannyr 17y agoMy guess is it's a talent acquisition.
- ivankirigin 17y agoThe tech at FriendFeed is nothing to scoff at.
- jacquesm 17y agohe didn't
- ivankirigin 17y agoYes, saying it is for talent is like saying it isn't for tech.
- jacquesm 17y agoTheir tech is great, but look at who is running that place, it is like buying google at half price time. Really good news, for both parties.
- abossy 17y agoYou know that the talent is what produces the tech, right? Sheesh.
- dmoho 17y agoI think he was saying that the tech, impressive as it is, pales in comparison to the talent.
- sachinag 17y agohttp://www.quantcast.com/friendfeed.com http://www.quantcast.com/friendfeed.com http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/
- run4yourlives 17y agoYeah, no kidding. Does it become a real acquisition when it's really a disguised signing bonus? :-)
- staunch 17y agoAssuming the acquisition was for $20-$40 million+ in stock, that's way outside the signing bonus territory.
- run4yourlives 17y agoFor the man who built gmail and his hand picked team of techs, $20-40 million (less the actual company value) is probably a pretty good deal, especially for a company that really needs to make some cash in the next year or two.
- callmeed 17y agoGeneral questions about "talent acquisitions" ... when it happens, what's to keep the talent from leaving? Is it generally a scenario where the talent wouldn't sell if they didn't want to stay on board–or are there also clauses in the acquisition that actually prevent them from leaving?
- aneesh 17y agoMy understanding is that usually a significant part of the payout is in stock, which will vest over a couple years.
- Herring 17y agoFacebook stock? haha
- run4yourlives 17y agoThe latter. Always. Usually with extra incentive to ensure that you are productive over the period you are there.
- turtle4 17y agoBut how does this work with the non-owning 'talent'? The owners of a company can't force/guarantee that their engineers are going to stay, right?
- drusenko 17y agoVesting. Nearly all startups grant equity options to employees, and these options vest over a certain period of time (usually 4 years). While employment is usually at-will, if you leave, you lose all of your unvested stock (hence, the incentive to stick around).
- run4yourlives 17y agoYou can offer vesting or other stock type transactions to secure loyalty, or it can even be as simple as offering retention bonuses to key staff members. It's not overly complex, and talent would be assessed at individual performance and job function levels.
- Tiktaalik 17y agoIt must be. There's not much interesting about Friendfeed that isn't done easier on Facebook.
- access_denied 17y agoAssuming that this type of information is worth anything, Friendfeed delivers insight into corelations like 'how many FB users also do use SN XYZ regularly', or not?
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- danielrhodes 17y agoPartially, but Friendfeed has a lot of technology that Facebook would want. They have a good grasp of real-time and search, they have the full firehose to Twitter (which is not something Twitter would have given to Facebook otherwise -- Google is desperate for such access), and the team of course. I don't think Frienfeed is at the top of its category either, which means that it probably was affordable.
- jonknee 17y agoAccess to Twitter's "full firehose" can easily be turned off, if Twitter doesn't want Facebook to access it they can make that happen instantly.
- danielrhodes 17y agoTrue, depending on the agreement they have in place.
- theoneill 17y agoNot likely. Note the following rather more informed subthread further down the page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=753825 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=753825
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- goodkarma 17y agoWow, congrats to Paul Buchheit and the rest of the Friendfeed team!
- budu3 17y agoYep, I'm really happy for Paul. He's proven to be an astute investor and a great founder.
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- tptacek 17y agoThis is good news for me, as I use Facebook and have been a long-distance admirer of FriendFeed with no time to actually investigate yet another new service.
- adamhowell 17y agoI think the most interesting thing about this (other than the fact that Friendfeed sold so early) is that, I'd guess, about half the company is already set for life from Google.
- jacquesm 17y agoThe standard 18 months ago: http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/facebook-acquires-friendfeed-0 http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/facebook-acquires-fri...
- ilamont 17y agoThe Prediction Market community was overwhelmingly against the idea that FB would acquire FF -- but that was based on a 2008 timeline.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- apgwoz 17y agoThis doesn't make me happy. FriendFeed is an amazing product, and though I'm glad that they are getting their payday for it, I hope the service doesn't get killed off or abandoned. I'm not so much a fan of Facebook, so potentially being forced to use it so that I can continue to use the features I love from FriendFeed is more or less going to cause me to look somewhere else for those features, which unfortunately is not something I'm likely to find elsewhere.
- thaumaturgy 17y agoYes, and Facebook's history in dealing with its users is prompting me to remove my FriendFeed account now.
- michaelneale 17y agoI agree - I am not at all comfortable with facebook, even though I use it, I am very very wary... They seem to be happy to do as they feel by default.
- treyp 17y agoNobody has said it, so I guess I'll go ahead -- I don't like to hear this. I use Facebook a lot, but I think Friendfeed is such a great product and that Facebook is such a mature site that nothing good can come of the acquisition. The absolute best case would be that the Friendfeed talent supremely cleans up the code at Facebook to make it a much faster site, but even that would be at the cost of Friendfeed's development.
- spencerfry 17y agoI disagree that nothing good can come of it. Friendfeed has mastered real-time whereas Facebook still hasn't. Friendfeed can step in and clean up Facebook's news feed and make it a lot better, which I'm sure they're going to be tasked with doing.
- treyp 17y agowhich is why i said "but even that would be at the cost of Friendfeed's development." Friendfeed has already admitted they don't know what will happen to their product long term now. if they disappear, that's one competitor that goes away, which probably will mean slower innovation in social sites in general.
- dbz 17y agoFriend Feed now gets a hold of those 250 million or so users, which is part of the goal- the goal being to make the best possible social network with the most users. Yup, this helps facebook become better, and friendfeed, although it might not exist anymore, gives the developers 250 million users. Sounds alright to me.
- intellectronica 17y agoHuh! I must admit I was secretly hoping that would happen. I hope that's more than a recruitment round, and that Facebook will now gain all the functionality from FriendFeed.
- ryanpetrich 17y agoThe IT Crowd wins again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg&feature=fvst http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg&feature=fvst
- handelaar 17y agoSee also: http://www.friendface.org http://www.friendface.org
- matt1 17y agoAny guestimates on the acquisition price? It'll be fun to point back here if we ever find out.
- webwright 17y agoFriendfeed raised $5m... I'd guess on a post-money valuation of $25m. So a $25m exit would basically mean that the investors in the most recent round get a 1 to 1 payout for their investment. Not a big win. But justifying a $50+mm offer for FriendFeed seems awful hard-- so my guess is $25-$35m. It does get the FF investors a pile of Facebook stock which is pretty hard to come by (but at what valuation for FB?). OTOH, Facebook has scads of stock to give away, and at their atmospheric valuations, buying FriendFeed for $100m in pure stock would be like trading 1/65th of Facebook ($6.5B valuation) for it...
- boundlessdreamz 17y agoMy guess is that deal will be somewhere around $25-30mn cash and $40mn stock.
- billydean 17y ago$25-50 million
- redorb 17y agoway high, think more like <10mm , plus great signing bonuses for the employees (200k+ ea) ..
- jgrahamc 17y agoPerfect. I managed to put off signing up for FriendFeed long enough.
- oliveoil 17y agoHaha.. I am also putting off signing up for Twitter.
- TweedHeads 17y agoNow there is a hole waiting to be filled... with proven value.
- msort 17y agoI really hope friendfeed can stay independent, and grow itself into something much bigger. On the other hand, this should create opportunities for other social aggregation startups.
- Tiktaalik 17y agoBigger than what? Facebook? The company that owns them? Just close down Friendfeed now.
- blasdel 17y ago"Facebook buying Friendfeed is like cloning yourself, not feeding it for a few years, and then eating it." http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-6353.cfm http://www.fimoculous.com/archive/post-6353.cfm
- teamonkey 17y ago"Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now." And so are they. Sorry, couldn't resist. Data harvesting is the first thing I think of when I hear "Facebook" these days.
- vijayr 17y agoFB has always wanted Twitter, but Twitter is probably too expensive at the moment. So it makes sense for them to buy FF. Not sure what they would do with it though.
- indiejade 17y agoDisaster.
- jganetsk 17y agoI'm so happy. Twitter is run by a bunch of pseudo-technological hipsters. By FB buying FF, hackers unite to face the foe!
- rythie 17y agoThe problem is with so many big social graphs already on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. it's difficult to build another. They were competing against Twitter and Facebook at the same time. Twitter is getting masses of press and Facebook already has masses of users. FriendFeed had a good product technically but still weren't getting there in gaining active users. If you look at friendfeed's stats they've leveled off for the last 7 months http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/ http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/ FriendFeed was a technology company they know search, real-time, scaling etc. but social networking isn't just those things. Facebook gets the interface and it clearly works for people, but they have so far not done much with realtime, and since it's new I expect there are very few people that have experience of that. To me, both sides needed this, friendfeed had stopped growing and Facebook needs to evolve against Twitter and the trend for realtime (on the web) in general.
- mhartl 17y agoI'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an employee at Facebook, in exchange for an amount of money that can't possibly represent the bulk of his net worth. That doesn't seem like a particularly good outcome to me. Does anyone know any different?
- far33d 17y agoI don't think that Paul Bucheit is CEO
- mhartl 17y agoIt's surprisingly hard to find out (http://gigaom.com/2009/06/24/with-file-sharing-friendfeed-rides-the-collaboration-wave/ http://gigaom.com/2009/06/24/with-file-sharing-friendfeed-ri... was the best reference I could find), but it seems that you're right. It looks like FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor is the CEO. My mistake.
- zaidf 17y agoGoals change. Especially when faced with cash and wealth.
- jsz0 17y agoI'm guessing he's interested in social networking on a broader scale than just getting rich off it. Running your own business can be exciting but being involved in something that is fundamentally changing the way humans interact with each other on a massive scale is probably pretty neat too.
- nadim 17y agohttp://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-life-than-money.html http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...
- alexandros 17y agoI was hoping it would be google that would step up to the plate, not facebook to be honest. The friendfeed team is a serious weapon for facebook to wield against google and I don't know why the FF guys would enter this war, on this side. Maybe Google did something to piss them off? On the plus side, the FF guys will now get paid for the FB dev work they have been doing anyways. If I recall correctly buchheit was also involved in adsense, another pain point for facebook. Also the real-time search assets that fb would get from ff may fill the goals that facebook had with the attempted twitter acquisition. The plot thickens...
- nuweborder 17y agoCould the agreement by FriendFeed, to sell to Facebook have been pushed along by the possible emergence of the supposed FriendFeed Killer by Apple, dubbed iFriendFeed (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/apple-planning-some-super-secret-social-app/ http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/apple-planning-some-sup...)? Maybe. If so, the company may have cashed on on that $50 million just in the nick of time. But still, Facebook also benefitted from aquiring those former Google Vets that can enhance their creative social media service quite a bit.