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Facebook acquires FriendFeed

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The big social network news of the day is Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed.

facebook-friendfeedFriendFeeds’ cofounder Bret Taylor spoke of the two networks’ “common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends”, while Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg spoke of how he “admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information” ever since he first used FriendFeed.

For the moment, FriendFeed will continue to run as a standalone service, while all FriendFeed’s staff will work for Facebook and its directors will take new senior positions. [Read more…]

New Friendfeed Widgets Available

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Social activity aggregator FriendFeed has launched a new set of embeddable widgets, enabling blog owners to keep their readers informed of their every move.

Among the widgets: A FriendFeed Badge to show off the services you use and your recent FriendFeed activity; A FriendFeed Feed Widget that let’s you embed your feed or a room’s feed on your blog or Web site; And the FriendFeed Chicklet, the most compact way to link your site’s visitors to your FriendFeed.

Aside from getting your readers more involved with your activities, you can also share stores and conduct more customizations than ever before.

Access the new goodies here.

AOL Purchases SocialThing!

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It’s official: After only five months in private beta, lifestreaming service SocialThing! has been acquired by AOL.

Look out FriendFeed.

You can expect SocialThing! to be integrated with Bebo, AIM, and other community properties.

Despite recent blog cuts due to “budget,” it seems AOL’s pockets are deep enough to buy new products, just not pay the content folks to keep it fresh.

The price tag has not yet been revealed.

What makes SocialThing! special is its “smart algorithm” that can figure out who you’re friends with, making the need to define a friend list unnecessary.