Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/

by jasonlbaptiste • 17 years ago

279 82 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

dannyr• 17 years ago

My guess is it's a talent acquisition.

ivankirigin2• 17 years ago

The tech at FriendFeed is nothing to scoff at.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

he didn't

sachinag• 17 years ago

http://www.quantcast.com/friendfeed.com http://siteanalytics.compete.com/friendfeed.com/

run4yourlives4• 17 years ago

Yeah, no kidding. Does it become a real acquisition when it's really a disguised signing bonus? :-)

staunch• 17 years ago

Assuming the acquisition was for $20-$40 million+ in stock, that's way outside the signing bonus territory.

callmeed• 17 years ago

General 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• 17 years ago

My understanding is that usually a significant part of the payout is in stock, which will vest over a couple years.

run4yourlives4• 17 years ago

The latter. Always. Usually with extra incentive to ensure that you are productive over the period you are there.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

One simple way is to make that a condition of the sale.

The second is to defer part of the payment until that condition is met.

The third is 'golden handcuffs' though I doubt that would be very effective with this crowd.

delano• 17 years ago

Retention bonuses.

Tiktaalik2• 17 years ago

It must be. There's not much interesting about Friendfeed that isn't done easier on Facebook.

access_denied• 17 years ago

Assuming 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?

danielrhodes2• 17 years ago

Partially, 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.

jonknee2• 17 years ago

Access 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.

theoneill• 17 years ago

Not likely. Note the following rather more informed subthread further down the page:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=753825

goodkarma• 17 years ago

Wow, congrats to Paul Buchheit and the rest of the Friendfeed team!

budu3• 17 years ago

Yep, I'm really happy for Paul. He's proven to be an astute investor and a great founder.

tptacek• 17 years ago

This 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• 17 years ago

I 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.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

The standard 18 months ago:

http://www.thestandard.com/predictions/facebook-acquires-fri...

ilamont• 17 years ago

The Prediction Market community was overwhelmingly against the idea that FB would acquire FF -- but that was based on a 2008 timeline.

apgwoz• 17 years ago

This 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• 17 years ago

Yes, and Facebook's history in dealing with its users is prompting me to remove my FriendFeed account now.

michaelneale• 17 years ago

I 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.

treyp2• 17 years ago

Nobody 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• 17 years ago

I 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.

treyp2• 17 years ago

which 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• 17 years ago

Friend 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• 17 years ago

Huh! 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• 17 years ago

The IT Crowd wins again: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rNgCnY1lPg&feature=fvst

handelaar• 17 years ago

See also: http://www.friendface.org

matt1• 17 years ago

Any guestimates on the acquisition price?

It'll be fun to point back here if we ever find out.

billydean2• 17 years ago

$25-50 million

redorb2• 17 years ago

way high, think more like <10mm , plus great signing bonuses for the employees (200k+ ea) ..

webwright• 17 years ago

Friendfeed 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...

boundlessdreamz2• 17 years ago

My guess is that deal will be somewhere around $25-30mn cash and $40mn stock.

mikebo• 17 years ago

According to WSJ, roughly $15MM in cash, $32.5MM in Facebook stock, based on the previous $6.5 billion valuation.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124993350820120361.html

jgrahamc• 17 years ago

Perfect. I managed to put off signing up for FriendFeed long enough.

oliveoil• 17 years ago

Haha..

I am also putting off signing up for Twitter.

TweedHeads• 17 years ago

Now there is a hole waiting to be filled... with proven value.

msort• 17 years ago

I 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.

Tiktaalik2• 17 years ago

Bigger than what? Facebook? The company that owns them?

Just close down Friendfeed now.

blasdel• 17 years 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

teamonkey• 17 years 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• 17 years ago

FB 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• 17 years ago

Disaster.

rythie• 17 years ago

The 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/

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.

mhartl3• 17 years ago

I'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• 17 years ago

I don't think that Paul Bucheit is CEO

mhartl3• 17 years ago

It's surprisingly hard to find out (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• 17 years ago

Goals change. Especially when faced with cash and wealth.

jsz0• 17 years ago

I'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• 17 years ago

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...

mhartl3• 17 years ago

I remember reading that post when he wrote it. From the post:

That's why, even though I don't financially need to work, I choose to work (and end up staying up until 4am pushing new code). It's why we created FriendFeed, to have a great place to work, a place where we can build great products and have happy users. Of course I'd also like to earn a few billion dollars, and I plan to make all of our employees very wealthy, but that's more like a bonus.

Rather than undermining it, I think this underscores my point. It's precisely because there's more to life than money that I'm surprised he was willing to sell. I would have expected only a ~$1 billion price tag to tempt him.

alaskamiller• 17 years ago

I'm going to guess that the fact that Mark Zuckerberg showed up is a sign to assure him that he's going to be a very well-respected and well-tended to employee at Facebook with access to a bigger engineering team, a huge user base, all the resources he wants, and maybe even a chance to get a crack at Facebook software itself.

That's pretty enticing.

alexandros• 17 years ago

I 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...

jganetsk• 17 years ago

I'm so happy. Twitter is run by a bunch of pseudo-technological hipsters. By FB buying FF, hackers unite to face the foe!

nuweborder• 17 years ago

Could 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-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.

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

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