Neowin.net

News has broken today that social networking giant, Facebook, has acquired the website FriendFeed, a company which has had a rather strong influence on many of the commonly-used features that Facebook provides. TechCrunch initially reported the story, and they're doing their best to try and get more details. So far we've seen press releases from both companies.

FriendFeed said that they have accepted Facebook's friend request, and have provided a bit of clarity for current users of the site. As it stands, everything will operate normally, and any news related to the website will be posted here. FriendFeed say that any future plans that they conclude on with Facebook will be openly shared with the community, and the API for the website will remain operating as normal too.

This is certainly quite good for Facebook, considering the team of 12 employees at FriendFeed. They have a range of ex-Google workers, including one Paul Buchheit, the man who was behind Gmail, and also led the way with advertising for the company. According to Facebook's press release, Bret Taylor, a co-founder of FriendFeed, said, "Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends. We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world." Buchheit added, "As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built and their desire to have us contribute to it. It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."

Expect to see more announcements on this soon.