Facebook to Acquire Twitter-Like Search Engine

August 11, 2009 · Filed Under News by Kalyani Mukherjee·

Social networking site Facebook said on Monday that it had reached a deal to acquire FriendFeed, a service that pulls in real-time data from many sources on the Web to one place in the manner of a much more popular site Twitter.

In a cash and stock deal reported to be worth $50 million, Facebook will take over FriendFeed and thus gain valuable expertise and technology in an area which many experts are already calling the next big thing on the Web. FriendFeed was publicly launched in 2008 by two former employees of Google, Bret Taylor and Jim Norris who designed the service as a way of helping users to organize their online social lives at one place. This meant gathering all data from various sites like photo updates on Facebook to rentals on Netflix and Twitter updates in real-time search using an advanced search engine.

The acquisition of FriendFeed and its search engine is being considered as a valuable addition for Facebook whose own search engine is less powerful in the sense it can retrieve data only from certain pages within its own social networking site. Moreover the acquisition also gains significance since it comes around nine months after Twitter turned down a $500 million takeover bid from Facebook.

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