Facebook Acquires FriendFeed • Hacker News Board

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#81

Post by jsz0 » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 3:34 AM UTC

mhartl wrote: post #75

I'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an employee at Facebook, in exchange for…

I'm guessing he's interested in social networking on a broader scale than just getting rich off it. Running your own business can be exciting but being involved in something that is fundamentally changing the way humans interact with each other on a massive scale is probably pretty neat too.

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#82

Post by nadim » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 3:42 AM UTC

mhartl wrote: post #75

I'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an employee at Facebook, in exchange for…

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#83

Post by alaskamiller » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 4:34 AM UTC

mhartl wrote: post #75

I'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an employee at Facebook, in exchange for…

I'm going to guess that the fact that Mark Zuckerberg showed up is a sign to assure him that he's going to be a very well-respected and well-tended to employee at Facebook with access to a bigger engineering team, a huge user base, all the resources he wants, and maybe even a chance to get a crack at Facebook software itself.

That's pretty enticing.

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#84

Post by mhartl » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 4:59 AM UTC

nadim wrote: post #82

mhartl wrote: post #75

I'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an employee at Facebook, in exchange for…

http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/12/is-there-more-to-li...

I remember reading that post when he wrote it. From the post:

That's why, even though I don't financially need to work, I choose to work (and end up staying up until 4am pushing new code). It's why we created FriendFeed, to have a great place to work, a place where we can build great products and have happy users. Of course I'd also like to earn a few billion dollars, and I plan to make all of our employees very wealthy, but that's more like a bonus.

Rather than undermining it, I think this underscores my point. It's precisely because there's more to life than money that I'm surprised he was willing to sell. I would have expected only a ~$1 billion price tag to tempt him.

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#85

Post by mhartl » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 5:02 AM UTC

far33d wrote: post #79

mhartl wrote: post #75

I'm puzzled by this acquisition from FriendFeed founder & CEO Paul Buchheit's perspective. As employee #23 at Google, Paul was already independently wealthy when he started FriendFeed. Though getting richer seems a likely secondary motive, I always figured FriendFeed was primarily a way for Paul to have the excitement of running his own company. Now he will (presumably) become an employee at Facebook, in exchange for…

I don't think that Paul Bucheit is CEO

It's surprisingly hard to find out (http://gigaom.com/2009/06/24/with-file-sharing-friendfeed-ri... was the best reference I could find), but it seems that you're right. It looks like FriendFeed cofounder Bret Taylor is the CEO. My mistake.

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#86

Post by alexandros » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 9:10 AM UTC

I was hoping it would be google that would step up to the plate, not facebook to be honest. The friendfeed team is a serious weapon for facebook to wield against google and I don't know why the FF guys would enter this war, on this side. Maybe Google did something to piss them off? On the plus side, the FF guys will now get paid for the FB dev work they have been doing anyways. If I recall correctly buchheit was also involved in adsense, another pain point for facebook. Also the real-time search assets that fb would get from ff may fill the goals that facebook had with the attempted twitter acquisition.

The plot thickens...

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#87

Post by jganetsk » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 1:57 PM UTC

I'm so happy. Twitter is run by a bunch of pseudo-technological hipsters. By FB buying FF, hackers unite to face the foe!

Re: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

#88

Post by nuweborder » Tue, Aug 11, 2009, 5:56 PM UTC

Could the agreement by FriendFeed, to sell to Facebook have been pushed along by the possible emergence of the supposed FriendFeed Killer by Apple, dubbed iFriendFeed (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/11/apple-planning-some-sup...)? Maybe. If so, the company may have cashed on on that $50 million just in the nick of time. But still, Facebook also benefitted from aquiring those former Google Vets that can enhance their creative social media service quite a bit.