Facebook's Narcissism Empire Grows with FriendFeed Buy
Facebook confirmed it will buy the social aggregation service FriendFeed on undisclosed terms. It would appear that narcissism is a bounded phenomenon.
FriendFeed was, at one point, the darling of Silicon Valley; when one well-known blogger and database engineer left Yahoo last year, he publicly declared he'd rather work at FriendFeed than at Twitter. And no wonder: FriendFeed let Valley A-listers trade a wide array personal trivia from multiple services faster and faster, sating a deep hunger for narcissistic minutiae.
But if the rapid growth of Twitter over the past year has proven anything, it's that people outside of Silicon Valley are happy to source their trivia from a single, simple service, rather than from an aggregator like FriendFeed. Which is why we said more than a year ago that the latter's features were destined, one way or another, to be absorbed into Facebook.
Having invented GMail and Google AdSense, FriendFeed co-founder Paul Bucheit (pictured) will no doubt see his reputation burnished by successfully selling off his latest initiative; AllThingsD quotes a venture capitalist estimate of $50 million in cash and stock. But selling now highlights the limits of even that considerable accomplishment.
