Hi everyone, this is Valerie and I am here in igloo for work experience this week. Incidently, this week Facebook unexpectedly acquired FriendFeedso, for my first blog post, I thought what better thing was there to write about than my experiences with FriendFeed.

FriendFeed (founded by 2 ex-Google employees) is a social media aggregation service, sort of like a social melting pot that allows you to view all updates from you or your friends’ account with popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, blogs, etc. On top of that, Friendfeed is capable of conducting real time search and saved search option. In many ways it is very similar to a Twitter experience with added social media tools function.

Recently, Facebook acquired Friendfeed and it is reported that Facebook paid nearly $50 million for it. This acquisition of FriendFeed follows Facebook’s failed attempt last year to buy Twitter. The main reason for this acquisition as stated on the statement was synergy of technology and of team members. But really, Facebook needed real-time search feature and Friendfeed needed more users. This acquisition bumped Friendfeed, a nobody into Facebook’s community of 250+ million of members around the world with it. Overall, this is a win-win situation for both parties.

Upon setting up my own FriendFeed account via Facebook, I’m loving the simple + clean layout, fast loading home page, easy to use interface and everything else was pretty much self explanatory. Unlike Twitter, FriendFeed doesn’t come with word limit (yay!), automatically groups similar updates, loads more updates for easy viewing, is great for very specific search and you can even cc your update to Twitter. How convenient!

As an avid Twitter fan, I do realise that most people have grown accustomed to manually copy and paste their blog links everytime they have a new blog update. FriendFeed allows users to forget about mundane tasks like such as they can automatically retrieve your blog post as soon as your post goes live. Time saver, score!