Now We Know Facebook Liked FriendFeed a Lot but What about the Users?

So yesterday we heard the big news about Facebook acquiring FriendFeed. We have quickly remembered certain hints that should have demonstrated us there was the possibility long ago but the deal was obviously a surprise for the tech crowd and the blogosphere and everyone has been discussing the deal from every possible perspective but of course the most interesting question is that of the users of FriendFeed and their future with the service (or its absence).

My own first guess was that Facebook simply did not want FriendFeed to stay around for people (those “social media gurus” who are both on Facebook and FriendFeed) to notice how Facebook is copying the features originally introduced by FriendFeed. The entire hype around FriendFeed could probably bother people in the Facebook marketing team because they received too many comparisons in the press while they probably needed people to only think their product is the only tool that is intended to aggregate one’s content from around the web.

True, the vast majority of Facebook users have no idea FriendFeed exists at all and they don’t care about all the comparisons in the press as they are happy on Facebook anyway but to the marketing people who pursue coverage the usual comparisons could be disturbing - and this could push Facebook into buying FriendFeed instead of continuing to copy the startup’s features into their news feeds (which was quite logical given that both serve the same purpose).

All in all, I think this is a brilliant exit strategy (especially with roughly $50 million as the acquisition price) for a startup that have not introduced any monetization model yet and have been more about hype in the social media crowd than about mainstream adoption. The only thing that bothers me is that the founders will now have to work in Facebook (honestly, if someone bought my startup for so many million dollars, I’d fly away to build a cozy hotel on Bali without ever thinking twice) which proves Caroline McCarthy’s idea that this deal is more about talent acquisition than anything else.

In fact, I think the two factors could be combined here as hiring a talented team to work with you and getting rid of a service that you copy features from both sound like a pretty solid combination.

It is now quite obvious that FriendFeed will either stop its existence entirely (which is unlikely) or at least will not see any further upgrades - those nice betas that everyone in the Silicon Valley was so eager to participate in and review everywhere we could. Of course FriendFeed’s actual future is not clear as the long-term plans have not been figured out between the parties of the deal yet but it is evident that Facebook will hardly want to invest a nice amount into the startup only to see its team continue working on FriendFeed while Facebook is obviously developing its own news feed service in the same direction.

So this means that the social media crowd will either need to find a new darling to hype or begin hyping Facebook again as we used to do only a couple of years before. As for the users, we will either be offered to move our data already contributed to FriendFeed into Facebook in some manner or probably we will still have a chance to stay on FriendFeed with all our content and friends but without any certain prospects for the future because I don’t expect anyone will continue FriendFeed development or pay for its numerous servers now that it’s owned by Facebook.

Now it is no wonder that some of the FriendFeed fans are now more than unhappy to see their favorite tool moving to be a part of the social networking giant where it will hardly be noticeable at all. But to me it looks like there’s a pretty good side to it: finally Facebook will teach the mainstream users what lifestreaming is and why they may want to aggregate their feeds into one place - even if this place is Facebook instead of FriendFeed.

So in my opinion there’s an obvious benefit to the users here: instead of using two tools that are growing more and more similar with time (admittedly because Facebook admired FriendFeed so much that wanted to introduce very similar tools to our Facebook news feeds), we will finally be able to stick to only one of them. The good part is that it will be the bigger tool we will now use so there will be more people and more interesting conversations going on. (Note to all my FriendFeed followers: you can easily find me here on Facebook as well - just in case.)

In this sense I’d also want to see Facebook acquire Twitter as well for us not to waste time on Twitter anymore and only use Facebook status updates in the future. But this is exactly what will hardly happen as the prediction of Google pursuing Twitter acquisition for the live search functionality sounds way more reasonable. But whatever happens, it is not bad to see this type of consolidation finally happen in the online world as the mainstream users will only benefit - even if some of the geekier people will be disappointed about losing their favorite small and cozy tools where they could communicate with only a small crowd of similar geeks.