Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Twitter was buzzing today with a huge announcement that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. With over 250 Milion users worldwide it is an interesting move on Facebook’s part and will be even more interesting over the next few months as their intentions become clear. It is no secret that a huge portion of FriendFeeds content is driven by Twitter posts, so it could be an attempt on Facebook’s part to get closer to Twitter.

While I use FriendFeed, I really don’t see the value from an engagement perspective. From my standpoint it is basically a “catch all” for my social activities online. I don’t ever log in or comment through FriendFeed. The only time I do is if I need to change or add something. I do see value in having a “catch all” place for people to keep up to date with your social activity, however, I am not sure what Facebook would do to change that, or even if they would want to.

Time will tell what happens, but it is something that I am sure a lot of folks will be watching closely. Hopefully Facebook will clean up their privacy issues and win over the non-trusting demo of anti-Facebookers who enjoyed sites like FriendFeed as an alternative.

150 Million Active Users & Climbing

Congratulations to Facebook for reaching an amazing milestone of 150 million active users around the world! I learned (reading their blog post) that Facebook is available in more than 35 languages and 170 countries and territories.

Since their interface changed (and despite the protest from the change-resistent folks) the platform has become a lot better. I have personally noticed that I am not being as inundated with application requests and other silly little games and chatchke that I’m not really that interested in. It begs the question though, have application developers felt the burn since they changed their platform? Have people become less-engaged in the apps & has the novelty worn off?I’d be interesting in hearing from developers about whether they’ve noticed a change at all since the switch. My guess would be yes, but that is based on my own engagement. Now that my apps are in a neat little box out of the way of my profile, I often forget about them. I can’t remember the last time I sent a piece of flair or drew some graffiti.

The profiles were starting to look a bit MySpacey and tacky before they changed to the new layout, so I commend Facebook for noticing this and making the change quickly to avoid looking as awful as MySpace and keeping the content organized!