Facebook has acquired FriendFeed for nearly US$ 50 million. TechCrunch has the first interview given by Friendfeed cofounder Bret Taylor and Facebook’s VP products Chris Cox, post the aquisition.

Through this acquistion, Facebook benefits by adding the growing community at Friendfeed to its already swelling facebook customer base. With this Facebook also gets a star team of designers and developers that includes folks who were instrumental in developing products like Gmail and Google Maps. PLUS, it gets to integrate friendfeed’s twitter like real-time feed. Facebook has for long been eyeing real-time search. It had recently changed the home page to include twitter like status updates of friends and later also expanded by offering the users the option to receive their friends’ status updates on their mobiles, taking a leaf out of twitter’s book.  It had even some time back, tried to acquire Twitter. So what implications does this have for your website’s social media marketing strategy?

Lets look at how the acquisition impacts facebook use:
1. Friendfeed is actually real-time, more than Facebook’s news feed.
2. Friendfeed allows integration between various popular social networking sites including Twitter.
3. Users can exchange updates that are more than 140 character long.

The above means that you will soon be able to start a conversation on twitter and carry on and elaborate at Friendfeed/facebook. This kind of integration will help web marketers leverage their user base on both networks without having to spend too much time handling the accounts separately on Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter. As a user, you will be able to publish your twitter stream directly to Friendfeed/facebook. If its all about getting eyeballs, facebook’s acquisition of friendfeed is going to make it a tad easier for you to manage your social media marketing effort.

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