Facebook buys FriendFeed aggregator

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, an online aggregator of Twitter feeds and other social media services, social-networking websitesand blogs.

Facebook announced the acquisition on Monday but did not disclose financial terms. FriendFeed's12 employees will continue in their jobs under Facebook while its four founders will hold senior positions on the site's engineering and product teams.

FriendFeed, based in Mountain View, Calif.,is a popular servicethatallows users to build a customizedstreamof content fromvarious websites and social-networking tools. The service lets users keep track of what their friends are posting on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and personal blogs. Users can access their personalized feed through their email or on theircellphone orembed it onto web pagesthey use regularly such as their Facebook, blog or Twitter sites.

The four founders of the service Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh are all former Google engineers who helped design services such as Gmail and Google Maps. They started FriendFeed in 2007. Buchheit is also credited with coining Google's "don't be evil" motto.

In a blog post on Monday, Taylor said FriendFeed would continue to operate normally while a full long-term integration with Facebook is worked out.

The move by Facebook is being seen by bloggers as a way to beef up the social-networking website's real-time capabilities, particularly as Twitter becomes more popular, and as a way toacquire the skills of FriendFeed's acclaimed founders.

"And so begins the next step in Facebook's assault on Twitter," wrote TechCrunch.