Facebook acquires FriendFeed and ex-Google execs

Facebook has acquired Friendfeed and recruited the former Google executives responsible for its creation

Facebook has announced it is purchasing content aggregator FriendFeed and appointed its four founders to senior roles within the company.

FriendFeed was set up by four former Google staff: Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh. Buchheit in particular was a driving force in both Gmail and Google's AdSense products and is credited with devising Google's 'Don't be evil' ethos.

“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,” said Buchheit

“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.”

FriendFeed is a content aggregator that allows users to link in news feeds from multiple social networking sites, including Twitter and Facebook. It has a small but fanatical user base and should now be integrated into Facebook.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder.

"As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."

Facebook also announced that it would begin rolling out a new search engine for the site. The company said the FriendFeed acquisition would also give Facebook much more expertise in the field of search.