Facebook buys FriendFeed

Popular social networking site Facebook has bought FriendFeed.com, and will be taking its entire staff aboard, the companies announced this afternoon.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.

While the small 12-person team will become Facebook employees and the four founders (all ex-Google employees) will assume executive positions at the social network, where FriendFeed users will go is not as clear cut."

"FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being," The FriendFeed blog today says. "We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team."

Facebook already uses a number of FriendFeed's popular features, but one of the main advantages of FriendFeed is that its feeds show up in real time, where Facebook's status updates must be refreshed.