FaceBook acquires FriendFeed - A Users Take

While I was heads down working my real job, a big story was developing in the world of Social Media. FaceBook acquired Friendfeed.

Now many may look at this and go so what or what is friendfeed. I'll try to break it down for you. This will not be the same take that Technologizer or TechCrunch pushes out. See, they will look at it from a business stand point for the most part. I'm going to tell you about the casual users take.

First, let's go over what friendfeed is and what it has to offer.

In short, think of a single place (similar to Facebook) that you can catch the inflow of information from the people you subscribe to. But unlike Facebook, friendfeed is more open, much like Twitter. So if the person you are subscribing to has YouTube or Flickr or their blog listed, you would see those in your stream without having to have a two way relationship.

So now you are thinking, that's the news feed in Facebook, well yes and no. In friendfeed, if someone likes or comments on a "story" this it flows back to the top of your feed. This is one of the features I like about friendfeed. It filters out the stories that no one finds interesting.

I have used friendfeed on and off for the last six months or so. During that time, it appeared confusing, unorganized and more complex than what the average social media user would be interested in. But it did have several features that I noted above that are very nice and would be a nice fit with Facebook. Describing friendfeed can be difficult, so the best way is to dive in and see what you can see.

What does friendfeed give to Facebook. To top the list, talent. Most were former googlers. So that would be enough. Second, search. Search is big business and Facebook search for stories, news or even a friends status is lacking. Note: As I'm writing this, I see where Facebook is implementing real-time search. Lastly, features. Today you can see some of the friendfeed features in Facebook, such has the option to "like" a story or picture.

So what does this mean to Facebook users and what this means to friendfeed users. Let's start with the latter.

Will friendfeed remain as it is, based on what I have read yes. Will it stay that way, well that's a business decision that no one will smartly announce at this time. I do expect some if the improvements in the pipeline to continue. But long term, friendfeed may go the way of the dodo bird. Why have two models that do the same thing. It just drains the bank account and the talent to maintain both.

Over in Facebook land, expect to see many of the features, such as search, "subscribe" to non-friends, think ramped up Fan Pages and the rooms feature. Rooms allow you to filter by topic. I truly expect these to make their way into the everyday functions of Facebook.

In the end, it may be several months before we see the true impact of this move. I also expect to see other social media moves, and those will be based on search.