Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, which is extremely interesting for the social networking world for several reasons. It has long been discussed that Facebook does not have a business model in place to be profitable and yet now they are acquiring other companies…smart move? Mergers traditionally fail over 70% of the time…so how is this different? Firstly, Social Media is such a new concept even to those who are using it all the time, so the traditional statistics may very well not apply. Also, its reasonable to assume that Facebook wanted FriendFeed for the brains of the operation: indeed, they are keeping the staff on, as many of them were former Google employees responsible for such things as Gmail and Google Maps.

But what will Facebook do with this brilliant team? What is their strategy? At this point, I would say they are trying to grow their online presence even further. 250 million users dwarfs Twitter still, but there is so much buzz around Twitter and all of its real-time capabilites, especially its ability to take news and information viral almost instantaneously. Facebook has already implemented many FriendFeed features such as “Comments” and “Like” and now, according to Mashable, they get “a platform and a team that fills a number of gaps at a fraction of the cost (of Twitter).”

If you take it even further, going into Facebook’s attempt to purchase Twitter previously, it can be reasoned that they are trying to completely change our internet experience. This is the viewpoint of Oge Ekeh, of Single in Atlanta, who has mentioned that this recent acquisition does seem to show Facebook’s intent in this area. What would be the implications of this? Facebook has recently made all of its user data searchable by Google unless you set strict controls on your account. Its becoming a larger and larger resource by the day, as companies who are using Salesforce CRM can even synch with Facebook to import user data directly into their Contact Manager.

I think its going to be big, enormous even. Twitter better step it up, starting with adding a “Re-Tweet” button and a “Like” feature for posts. Thoughts?