Real Time Search: Facebook buys FriendFeed

Facebook acquired social media feed aggregator FriendFeed, hitting a home run in the real time search game vs. Google and Twitter, and becoming the new social media hub online.

Facebook took a bet on FriendFeed showing yet again openness in adopting advanced third party features that would improve its service: Flickr’s photo tagging, Delicious’s link sharing, and now FriendFeed’s search features in its real time search engine powered by Bing.

FriendFeed is the creation of four ex Google engineers that developed Gmail and Google Maps. Popular Facebook features as the “like” and “comment” items in users feeds, have been already inspired by FriendFeed. Pouring FriendFeed’s talent and technology on a social media platform that currently has 250 million users worldwide, is a massive blow to Facebook’s competitors in the real time search field: Google and Twitter.

Introducing the new share to “everyone” option in its Publisher (the application launched when you click on the Share button), Facebook will inject user data in a real time search engine that will allow search through shared media and status updates.

Will SEM switch from Google AdSense to Facebook?

What consequences will this deal bring to Search Engine Marketing and new media advertising? How will Google react?

Acquiring Twitter could be the most obvious response, and Google needs to catch up in integrating the social graph in a real time search engine.

FriendFeed’s co-founder Paul Buchheit, developed the original prototype of Google AdSense: Facebook could become web advertising heaven and a central hub of online social media, enabling 250 million users to share and search feeds from virtually any social media platform available on the web, including Twitter.

Is this the beginning of the end for Google?

For more on the subject, read the announcement on FriendFeed’s blog and Facebook’s press release.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Media News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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