Facebook acquired FriendFeed in 2009, gaining its team and technology.
FriendFeed was a social aggregation service founded by former Google employees, including Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. It allowed users to combine updates from multiple online services into a single stream and discuss them in real time.
Facebook announced the acquisition in August 2009. The deal included FriendFeed’s engineering team, whose members had experience building scalable social products. Bret Taylor later became an important Facebook executive and served as the company’s chief technology officer.
FriendFeed itself was eventually shut down in April 2015. Its influence is often discussed alongside Facebook’s evolving News Feed, but FriendFeed was a separate service and not merely an early name for Facebook’s feed.