In my earlier post, I wrote about the Bing-Yahoo search deal and how it was beneficial to both parties, with Microsoft potentially reaping bigger benefits over a longer term. Today another important deal happened. Friendfeed, a popular real time microblogging tool – similar, much more advanced in functionality, but much less popular than Twitter, was taken over by Facebook. According to the official friendfeed blog, FriendFeed accepted Facebook’s friend request!

Twitter has taken a step towards making real time search its prime focus with the recent redesign of its homepage. At my first read, it seemed as a move against allowing twitter to run away with the real-time search. Real time search is a big area where a lot of biggies, including top internet VCs are placing their bets on. However, this could even be a long term strategic decision – particularly with Google entering this arena with Wave and a whole community of developers already creating new applications using its APIs. Facebook has anticipated the development that may take place once Wave goes live and has taken steps to strengthen its position – which is a thoughtful management step in my opinion.

Potential mutual benefits of this deal include:

1. Facebook can integrate brilliant friendfeed features like Real time comments. Note that some of the very popular friendfeed features were included later in facebook, but thats another matter altogether.

2. Friendfeed community can benefit due to superior user profiles, facebook apps, friend connect and multimedia features on facebook.

3. Also, the userbase of facebook would imply that friendfeed’s cool features can now reach a wider audience all over the globe.

4. Where facebook can benefit is the perhaps the search functionality as well. I was a semi-active friendfeed user (I have a friendfeed widget on my personal blog even now) , and loved the functionality it offered. Facebook today launched a real time search which promises to change the fundamentals of this upcoming field as well.

Finally, there are already many articles online saying Facebook + friendfeed is a potential twitter killer etc. I don’t quite buy that argument. Facebook offers something unique to its users – an unparalleled social network experience where the unit of social interaction is a ‘friend’, while twitter is a pure implementation of the ‘follow’ model of social interaction. A place where facebook has implemented the Follow model brilliantly is Facebook pages- a topic i covered earlier as well. In my opinion, both services- friendfeed & facebook are amazing and I am sure, the deal will be great for both companies.

One thing for sure, the deal promises a lot and will bring greater pace in the development of the real time search aspect of the web industry.

What do you think of this deal, put in your comments about it right below!

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