It is not clear at this point in time if FriendFeed’s service will continue to be offered or if the website will be shut down eventually.

Both parties involved seem to be very happy with the deal while many members of the FriendFeed community appear disgruntled. Two of the main concerns are related to privacy. One fear is that user data will be carried over to Facebook, another that Facebook and FriendFeed are being used to address different groups of people. Many use Facebook to stay in touch with close friends and family while FriendFeed was being used as a way to communicate with groups of users who shared similar interests.

Below is the official press release that was issued by Facebook and the blog post written by FriendFeed:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“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 Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “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.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

FriendFeed blog post:

We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle…

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop — keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

My humble prediction is that FriendFeed will continue operations until the end of the migration phase. Any thoughts on this? Possible alternatives?

Users need to run Internet Explorer 8 to install accelerators. The accelerators can be installed by clicking on the install links on the developer’s websites: Twitter Accelerator and FriendFeed Accelerator.

Internet Explorer will display an installation dialog. A click on the Add button will install the accelerator in the web browser.

Selecting text in Internet Explorer 8 will from then on display a small icon next to it. Clicking on the icon will display the default accelerators plus a submenu that is listing all installed accelerators in Internet Explorer 8.

It might be a good idea to add the Twitter and FriendFeed Accelerators to the list of default accelerators to be able to access them more conveniently. This can be done by clicking on the Manage Accelerators entry in the sub menu. A right-click on any accelerator in the manager gives the option to set it as a default accelerator.

Below is a screenshot of how the information are displayed in the web browser. Example of Identify showing Sarah Perez’s information.

The developer does not provide extensive information about how the Identify add-on calculates the data except for the following short sentences found on the project page:

It makes extensive use of Google?s Social Graph API to find out about which sites an individual has profiles on and then uses YQL API to collect the information.

It can obviously only be executed on supported sites. The usual suspects like Twitter, Digg, Flickr or Friendfeed seem all to be supported by the add-on while sites like Ghacks are not. A link is provided for each identified profile on another service making it very easy to follow the trail of the individual.

The service displays keyword trends and examples like iPhone, Obama or Superbowl that can be clicked on to perform the search as well. Spy will search its index for occurrences of the entered or clicked on keyword. It uses Ajax to update the search screen automatically. Search results are ordered by relevance.

The service makes use of two display modes. Poster mode makes use of speech bubbles displaying user avatars and the messages.

While Spy is not the most thorough search engine out there it can be used for several purposes. It can be used to read reactions on blog posts or follow conversations about recent events.

I mentioned earlier that Adobe Air is needed to run Alert Thingy which means that you need to install it before you can install Alert Thingy. Some might think that I’m still living in the medieval Internet because I do not have a Twitter or Friendfeed account. It merely meant that I had no way of testing the application further, at least not the parts that needed an account at the two services.

I read at Techcrunch however that all information were displayed in one window in contrast to Twirl which displayed the information in two windows.

A nice addition is the tiny url generator which surely comes in handy when posting messages to Twitter. The Flickr upload was designed to be easy as well. As far as I can tell only one image can be uploaded at a time but that one can be dropped into the Alert Thingy interface. I suppose it’s a great application if you use those services.

Update: The Alert Thingy homepage is no longer available. Program downloads are still available on third party sites such as Softpedia. The issue here is however that the program is not updated anymore, which means that it will eventually (or already has) stop working with the three sites that it supports.

It is therefor a good idea to use a different software for the purpose. While I’m not aware of a program that combines Friendfeed, Twitter and Flickr in one interface, you could try MetroTwit for your Twitter needs or Element Photo Gallery for desktop photo uploads to Flickr.