Facebook Acquires Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor Along with FriendFeed   - 570 Views, 1 Comment

Paul Buchheit was the brain power behind such well-known (and lucrative) Google features as Google’s Adsense, and even Gmail, while Taylor was instrumental in the roll-out of Google Maps. Noriss and Singh were also valuable players while at Google, bringing the number of ex-Googlenauts coming into the Facebook fold with the acquisition of FriendFeed to at least four (it is unknown at this time whether any of the rest of the twelve employees of FriendFeed are either originally from Google, or going to along to Facebook).

Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, explained that “Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” and boasted that the blending of the two social networking families shows that “our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

For their part in this two-way love fest, FriendFeed founder Brett Taylor says that “Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends. 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.”

Added Buchheit, “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. 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.”

Facebook has stated that “FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.”