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My guess is it's a talent acquisition.
This doesn't make me happy. FriendFeed is an amazing product, and though I'm glad that they are getting their payday for it, I hope the service doesn't get killed off or abandoned. I'm not so much a fan of Facebook, so potentially being forced to use it so that I can continue to use the features I love from FriendFeed is more or less going to cause me to look somewhere else for those features, which unfortunately is…
Any guestimates on the acquisition price? It'll be fun to point back here if we ever find out.
But justifying a $50+mm offer for FriendFeed seems awful hard-- so my guess is $25-$35m.
It does get the FF investors a pile of Facebook stock which is pretty hard to come by (but at what valuation for FB?).
OTOH, Facebook has scads of stock to give away, and at their atmospheric valuations, buying FriendFeed for $100m in pure stock would be like trading 1/65th of Facebook ($6.5B valuation) for it...
My guess is it's a talent acquisition.
Partially, but Friendfeed has a lot of technology that Facebook would want. They have a good grasp of real-time and search, they have the full firehose to Twitter (which is not something Twitter would have given to Facebook otherwise -- Google is desperate for such access), and the team of course. I don't think Frienfeed is at the top of its category either, which means that it probably was affordable.
Nobody has said it, so I guess I'll go ahead -- I don't like to hear this. I use Facebook a lot, but I think Friendfeed is such a great product and that Facebook is such a mature site that nothing good can come of the acquisition. The absolute best case would be that the Friendfeed talent supremely cleans up the code at Facebook to make it a much faster site, but even that would be at the cost of Friendfeed's develop…
I disagree that nothing good can come of it. Friendfeed has mastered real-time whereas Facebook still hasn't. Friendfeed can step in and clean up Facebook's news feed and make it a lot better, which I'm sure they're going to be tasked with doing.
Friendfeed has already admitted they don't know what will happen to their product long term now. if they disappear, that's one competitor that goes away, which probably will mean slower innovation in social sites in general.
My guess is it's a talent acquisition.
Any guestimates on the acquisition price? It'll be fun to point back here if we ever find out.
Friendfeed raised $5m... I'd guess on a post-money valuation of $25m. So a $25m exit would basically mean that the investors in the most recent round get a 1 to 1 payout for their investment. Not a big win. But justifying a $50+mm offer for FriendFeed seems awful hard-- so my guess is $25-$35m. It does get the FF investors a pile of Facebook stock which is pretty hard to come by (but at what valuation for FB?). OTOH,…