(CNET) -- Surprise! Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, a Bay Area-based social-network feed aggregation start-up.
FriendFeed consolidates updates from social media and bookmarking sites, blogs and RSS feeds.
"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends," FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said in a release.
"We can't wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we've developed at FriendFeed to Facebook's 250 million users around the world."
TechCrunch reported the news on Monday, a matter of minutes before Facebook confirmed the acquisition.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say it: This is not as ridiculously huge of a deal as the Silicon Valley hype machine is going to have you believe.
Basically, FriendFeed has been coasting on a lot of hype and not a lot of mainstream recognition, and it's not a bit surprising that it would be seeking an exit at this point.
Facebook acquired it for its talent; prior to FriendFeed, Taylor was part of the team that helped launch Google Maps. So the real story here is that Facebook made the rather expensive hire (and we don't know the terms of the deal) of some very talented former Googlers.
FriendFeed's co-founders "will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams," according to the release, and the rest of the company's 12 employees will also join Facebook.
This would also be consistent with Facebook's minimal past acquisition history: the company bought little-known start-up Parakey two years ago with the primary objective of getting its founders, the creators of the Firefox browser, on board.
It's also well-known that Facebook tried hard to acquire Twitter -- which would've been a far more significant acquisition than FriendFeed -- and was turned down. (Well, there was also ConnectU, whose assets Facebook acquired pretty much just to get that pesky lawsuit off the table.)
The release from Facebook repeatedly hinted that this is about talent more than product.
"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in the statement.
"As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use."
Yup.
"As we spent time with Mark (Zuckerberg) and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they've built, and their desire to have us contribute to it," said FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit, another ex-Googler who was instrumental in building Gmail.
"It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook's engineers are about creating simple, groundbreaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."
But Facebook director of product Christopher Cox said to CNET News later, "I wouldn't call it a talent acquisition."
He elaborated, "We really have a vision that's focusing on Facebook being not just a destination but being a service. ... We think FriendFeed's been focused on how that's going to work in an open way, and that's something we're excited about, not just the people but the product they've built."
FriendFeed earned praise from prominent voices in Silicon Valley -- most notably Robert Scoble -- but its aim to aggregate all of a user's social networking activity feeds in one place didn't catch on with the mainstream.
But Facebook eventually began to mimic the FriendFeed model through upgrades to its central "news feed" feature, letting members pull in select third-party updates.
Bret Taylor said that FriendFeed wasn't shopping itself around. "We weren't up for sale. We had a healthy amount of financing and a really efficient company," he told CNET News.
"As we noticed our products were really converging in terms of product vision, we started having casual conversations with Facebook."
It's not clear what will happen to the FriendFeed service, because it sure sounds like Facebook is eager to get its team onto the engineering fast track. "FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being," a post by Taylor on the FriendFeed blog read.
"We're still figuring out our longer term plans for the product with the Facebook team."
Taylor elaborated more to CNET News later on Monday: "Anything that we would do would be more of a transition, not shutting down. I think our users have invested in our product by putting their data in it, sharing it with their friends. ...We absolutely wouldn't shut (FriendFeed) down."
(CNN) -- Facebook, for better or worse, is like being at a big party with all your friends, family, acquaintances and co-workers.
Facebook can be a great tool, and an occasional annoyance. What kind of Facebooker are you?
There are lots of fun, interesting people you're happy to talk to when they stroll up. Then there are the other people, the ones who make you cringe when you see them coming. This article is about those people.
Sure, Facebook can be a great tool for keeping up with folks who are important to you. Take the status update, the 160-character message that users post in response to the question, "What's on your mind?" An artful, witty or newsy status update is a pleasure -- a real-time, tiny window into a friend's life.
But far more posts read like navel-gazing diary entries, or worse, spam. A recent study categorized 40 percent of Twitter tweets as "pointless babble," and it wouldn't be surprising if updates on Facebook, still a fast-growing social network, break down in a similar way.
Combine dull status updates with shameless self-promoters, "friend-padders" and that friend of a friend who sends you quizzes every day, and Facebook becomes a daily reminder of why some people can get on your nerves.
Here are 12 of the most annoying types of Facebook users:
The Let-Me-Tell-You-Every-Detail-of-My-Day Bore. "I'm waking up." "I had Wheaties for breakfast." "I'm bored at work." "I'm stuck in traffic." You're kidding! How fascinating! No moment is too mundane for some people to broadcast unsolicited to the world. Just because you have 432 Facebook friends doesn't mean we all want to know when you're waiting for the bus.
What's going up?
Thursday, August 06, 2009
What: AirBorn manufacturing facility
Where: 3500 Snead Drive in Georgetown, off Georgetown Inner Loop east of Interstate 35
Who: The building was designed by Round Rock-based Moman Architects. Raymond Construction is the project's builder.
When: Ground was broken Wednesday on the $8 million project, which is scheduled to open next spring.
Details: AirBorn, which makes electronic components for the aerospace, avionics, defense, energy, medical and automotive industries, employs about 350 people at its current location in Georgetown.
At 58,000 square feet, the new facility will allow the company to add an estimated 150 employees in the next few years.
AirBorn will receive $300,000 in incentives from the City of Georgetown based on benchmarks for investment and job creation during the next five years. The incentive was approved by the Georgetown City Council.
By Neil Irwin
THE WASHINGTON POST
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
The wounded U.S. economy has shown signs of improvement in recent weeks. But many economists, who were caught off guard by the brutality of the downturn, are accentuating the negative, bracing for head winds that could cause the recovery to be weak.
Huge swaths of the financial system have been damaged, which could lock consumers and businesses out of loans for years to come. American families are saving more and relying less on borrowed money. In this global recession, no part of the world appears poised to lead a buoyant recovery. The government's aggressive stimulus efforts may need to wind down before the economy returns to solid footing.
Typically, a deep downturn is followed by a robust recovery. The 1981-82 recession was followed by explosive growth through the rest of the decade. Many top economists doubt that a boom will follow this time.
"Traditional economic models are built like a rubber band: You pull it hard, and it will snap back," said Martin Neil Baily, an economist at the Brookings Institution. "I find it hard to see where that will come from in this case."
Investors seemed to agree Monday, with major stock indexes falling at least 2 percent on concerns that consumer spending won't rebound anytime soon and that the recent rise in stocks was overly optimistic.
Unlike past recessions, this downturn has its roots in the breakdown of the financial system, triggered by the implosion of massive bubbles in the housing and credit sectors.
It appears increasingly likely that the U.S. economy will grow at a solid pace in the second half of the year, as companies restock depleted inventories. But it is unclear what would come after that, given the ongoing restrictions on credit.
Banks have sustained deep losses, and a wave of soured commercial real estate loans threatens to further limit their ability to lend in the year ahead. A bigger problem looms in credit markets, which account for vast chunks of mortgage lending, consumer loans and commercial real estate loans.
That makes it more expensive for people or businesses to borrow money - if they can get a loan - which could serve as a powerful brake on any recovery.
"Credit fuels housing. It fuels consumer durable goods. It fuels business investment," said Carmen Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. "Credit makes recessions after a financial crisis longer, and all the signs are that is happening this time as well."
A related head wind comes from consumers. Americans are saving more and paying down debt; the savings rate was 1.2 percent of disposable income in early 2008. By the second quarter of this year, that rose to 5.2 percent.
"The household sector has never been so stressed," said RGE Monitor Chairman Nouriel Roubini. "Savings has to go much higher, and that is going to slow growth of consumption even once incomes start growing."
Every dollar that Americans save is one fewer dollar for consumption, which means less economic output.
When the savings rate goes up by a percentage point, spending decreases by more than $100 billion, according to the McKinsey Global Institute.
When nations in financial crisis have defied the trend and experienced a rapid recovery, it was often because of strength elsewhere in the world. But what market today is clamoring for U.S. products?
"Everybody in the world is experiencing the same constraints on credit and on consumption," said Mark Gertler, an economist at New York University.
In the adjustment that appears to be taking place, the U.S. is reshuffling the relative importance of different parts of the economy: reducing consumer spending and investment in housing while increasing exports and business investment.
Exports are down 16 percent in the past year as global trade has plummeted, and business investment is down 20 percent as corporations have become more cautious and as access to credit has diminished.
Although widely held among top economists, the idea that all these head winds will weaken the recovery is not universal. The economy has proved resilient in the past, emerging out of deep downturns with force.
"There is only one reliable regularity in business-cycle history in the United States," said Michael Mussa, a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics, in a presentation this year. "Deep recessions are followed by steep recoveries, and economic forecasts almost never take account of this regularity."
By American-Statesman Staff | Wednesday, August 12, 2009, 05:07 PM
H-E-B said Wednesday it will open a store in Dripping Springs sometime next year
Construction is slated to begin this fall on the 68,000 square-foot store. It will be on the southeast corner of Highway 290 and Rob Shelton Boulevard.
"This hopefully will keep a lot residents shopping in their own community,"H-E-B spokeswoman Leslie Lockett said.
The H-E-B will have a gas station and car wash, a sushi bar and a bakery. It also will offer many items from the grocery chain's Central Market brand.
The store will be staffed by 300 employees, the company said.
The supermarket is part of Dripping Springs' largest retail initiative: a 55-acre development project that includes Home Depot, Chase Bank and Broadway Bank. Two sites are still available.
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