• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, August 10, 2009

Facebook announced today that it has acquired social media aggregator FriendFeed in a move that appears to be aimed at helping the social networking giant better compete with Twitter. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

And in what amounts to a one-two punch, Facebook separately said Monday it was rolling out real-time search for all users after testing the service that will compete directly with Twitter. With the new Facebook Search, people will now see the latest status updates and shared content from friends and others when they enter queries in the search box found in the upper right corner of site pages.

Under the agreement, all of Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed's 12 employees will join Facebook, and its four co-founders will assume senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams.

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

Facebook said FriendFeed.com, which allows users to aggregate feeds from different social networking services, will continue to operate normally for the time being as the companies decide how the service will be integrated long-term.

Started in 2007, FriendFeed won praise for allowing people to track activity across social networks and blogs broadly, but has been overshadowed by Twitter as the go-to Web tool for real-time updates. TechCrunch pointed out in April that FriendFeed was languishing -- with just 637,000 monthly unique users in February compared to 10 million for fast-growing Twitter, according to comScore figures.

According to Web measurement service Quantcast, Twitter had 26.5 million U.S. monthly users in June compared to just 267,000 for FriendFeed. While embraced by the Silicon Valley elite, FriendFeed "never made a strong impact on the larger social network user market," said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer who covers the social media space.

"As we spent time with Mark 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 in the announcement. He and the company's three other founders are Google veterans who helped develop products like Gmail and Google Maps. They join a growing number of other ex-Google executives and engineers at Facebook, most notably COO Sheryl Sandberg.

Facebook last year reportedly was close to acquiring Twitter for $500 million before talks fell apart. Since then, the social network has increasingly adopted features to compete with the microblogging sensation, including more frequent status updates, allowing updates to go to everyone instead of just friends, and letting people choose personalized usernames.

Internal Twitter documents obtained by TechCrunch last month also reportedly show the company is likewise obsessed about the competitive threat from its rival, listing ways "How Facebook could Kill us" by adopting real-time search and other Twitter features.

That fear proved all too true, with Facebook announcing it was turning on real-time search after starting to test the service about a month ago. "By being able to search more types of content that are being shared on the site, you can easily find out your friends' evening plans and recently frequented restaurants by searching for 'dinner;' discover which of your friends are following Michael Schumacher's comeback during the 'Formula 1' season by searching for the race series; or query 'economy' to see if people or your favorite news sources feel that the recession is turning around," wrote Facebook engineering manager Akhil Wable on the company blog.

People can also search for a company or product to find out what people are saying about them, giving marketers another way to track brand conversations on Facebook.

Along with the launch of its own-real time search engine, the FriendFeed acquisition could also help boost Facebook's efforts to rival Twitter as the "pulse of the planet."

"This acquisition, like other previous Facebook acquisitions, seems focused on adding features that Facebook coveted," said Williamson. "Facebook obviously recognizes that people are sharing and commenting in a variety of locations on the Web, not just on Facebook, and it wants to be a part of that."

In particular, she pointed out that if Facebook could provide real-time search across social media through FriendFeed, it could gain an advantage over Twitter. "So if FriendFeed ends up not only collating your friends' social activities but also allowing you to search for real-time commentary on a variety of social Websites, that makes it very valuable."

The importance of search to Twitter is reflected in the recent redesign of the service's home page, which prominently features a search box with the most popular search terms listed below by minute, day and week.