Rumors started early this morning and the sale has now been confirmed. Bret Taylor on the Friendfeed blog:
FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.
The Facebook press release.
Michael Arrington has the first post-sale interview with Friendfeed cofounder Bret Taylor and Facebook VP Products Chris Cox. The 12 FriendFeed employees will move out of their Mountain View offices and join Facebook at their Palo Alto headquarters.
Matt McGee at SearchEngineLand, notes that Facebook had previously been rejected by Twitter:
In buying FriendFeed, Facebook gets a very similar set of tools as if it had bought Twitter (some would say a better set of tools). FriendFeed recently launched its own real-time search tool that looks remarkably like the search experience on Twitter.
All 12 FriendFed employees will join Facebook now, and the four FriendFeed founders — all ex-Googlers — will take “senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams,” the release says. Financial terms of the deal were not released.