Three Reasons To Be Excited About Facebook’s Acquisition Of Friendfeed

Thanks to yesterday’s news of a $50M acquisition we can be sure that Friendfeed’s excellent ideas are finally going to be seen and appreciated by the mainstream web users on Facebook. While many of the FriendFeed faithful are nervous about the coming assimilation, there are still plenty of reasons to be happy about this deal. Let’s talk about a few of them:

Advanced messaging

Friendfeed users enjoy the luxury of being able to read and write to the site via web, IM, or email. Facebook could use that.  You don’t have to look far to see folks prognosticating that Facebook mail will overtake regular webmail for a portion of net users.

Top-notch team room capabilities

Private and public FF rooms are chock full of collaboration features that FB groups can benefit tremendously from: Per-item comments, multimedia sharing, more. Think the FB newsfeed but inside a team room in lieu of the forums you see now.  The email and IM-based monitoring are great for small work teams where members only occasionally get to check in.

Huge potential for user experience improvements

The Facebook user experience today is nothing if not cluttered.  FriendFeed’s team has a strong pedigree in elegantly simple web apps.  Perhaps GMail creator and FF cofounder Paul Buchheit can make Facebook’s mail client the GMail competitor we’d love to see.

A look at the Friendfeed roster shows that the team has been involved with the development of these successful Google products:

• Mail (Paul created it)
• Reader
• Maps / Maps API (Bret was project lead)
• AdSense (Paul created it)
• Search Appliance (Sanjeev worked on it)
• Calendar (Kevin)
• Talk
• profiles

How many of those things is Facebook currently doing better than Google?  Currently I’d say profiles and ads are the only places where FB has any leverage against Google, and the ad connection is pretty tenuous.  Let’s hope Friendfeed’s strong core of talent can help make the FB juggernaut more valuable to all of its users.

Friendfeed’s great ideas are finally going mainstream

So let’s hear it for Friendfeed joining Facebook and the FF team sharing their great experience and wonderful development history with Facebook.  Now your Facebook account will be more useful to you and you won’t have to worry about talking other people into trying Friendfeed anymore.

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• FriendFeed Users Outraged by Facebook Acquisition (mashable.com)
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• Facebook acquires FriendFeed (news.cnet.com)