A chat with the co-founder of Friend­Feed from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

Today came word that Face­book, the world’s largest social net­work­ing site, is buy­ing the microblog­ging ser­vice Friend­Feed.

This is inter­est­ing on a cou­ple of lev­els. First, it pro­vides fur­ther proof that Twit­ter — the microblog­ging plat­form that has taken the world by storm this year — is truly not for sale. Sec­ond, it ratch­ets up the face­off between Face­book and Google for supremacy in the social net­work­ing space. The four co-founders of Friend­Feed are all ex-Google employ­ees. Co-founder Paul Buch­heit (above), whom I inter­viewed a few weeks ago at the UGCX con­fer­ence in San Jose, was the cre­ator and lead devel­oper of Gmail. He also sug­gested Google’s now-famous motto “Don’t be evil” in a 2000 meet­ing on com­pany val­ues accord­ing to Wikipedia

In this 10-minute inter­view, a relaxed Buch­heit talks about the company’s ori­gins and launch in Octo­ber 2007 from the very sim­ple idea of “let­ting me know what’s going on with my friends” (one co-founder came at it from the premise of “friend alerts”).

Early in our talk I asked Paul what dif­fer­en­ti­ated Friend­Feed from Facebooks’s per­son­al­ized news stream and from Twit­ter. He said that Friend­Feed tends to be more con­tent– and communication-oriented, encour­ag­ing peo­ple to share tid­bits about what’s going on with them, instead of alert­ing peo­ple what Face­book group they’d joined or whether they’d been bit­ten by a zombie.

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FriendFeed’s premise is quite sim­i­lar to Twitter’s, and I should have asked Paul about how Twit­ter has suc­cess­fully lever­aged an out­side devel­oper com­mu­nity by let­ting coders build appli­ca­tions on top of its plat­form — and why Friend­Feed hasn’t taken a sim­i­lar approach. But we did get into some of the dif­fer­ences between the two ser­vices. I like how Friend­Feed threads dis­cus­sions, in a way sim­i­lar to forums and bul­letin boards, let­ting peo­ple chime in on inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tions and pro­vid­ing some con­text. You can also “Like” a posted item, which is an easy way of con­vey­ing your approval.

FriendFeed’s chief value adds

I told Buch­heit that I think of Friend­Feed as an uber-aggregator of my social net­works: my blog posts, Flickr uploads, Face­book sta­tus updates and Deli­cious book­marks. That’s how peo­ple who aren’t heavy users of Friend­Feed prob­a­bly see the ser­vice — as a huge time saver, free­ing you from hav­ing to man­u­ally post those things. Buch­heit acknowl­edged that but coun­tered, “We actu­ally think of it as mak­ing it very easy to share things with your friends and to have enjoy­able dis­cus­sions. The aggre­ga­tion part is not the pur­pose as much as a mech­a­nism.” Friend­Feed, he added, is about enabling peo­ple to share ideas, opin­ions, dis­cov­er­ies and small moments that you want to share but don’t want to write a long blog post about.

Another com­pelling fea­ture of Friend­Feed is the abil­ity to cre­ate pri­vate or pub­lic “rooms,” or groups. Some of my geekier friends always want to get a dis­cus­sion going in FriendFeed’s pri­vate rooms. I blong to FF group such as Social Media Club, RWW, Graph­ics N’ Design, Twit­ter and Per­sian Cam, which Paul turned me on to. Serendip­ity is a cen­tral part of the site’s experience.

This morn­ing Robert Scoble did a quick audio inter­view with Buch­heit about the company’s sale to Face­book. (Lis­ten to it on BlogTalkRa­dio.) Here’s Robert’s Friend­Feed thread about it, and here is Paul’s feed. “We’re com­pletely com­mit­ted to serv­ing the users of Friend­Feed, we don’t want to leave them stranded,” Paul tells Robert.

The Wall Street Jour­nal reported this after­noon: “Face­book paid nearly $50 mil­lion for the com­pany, in a com­bi­na­tion cash and stock offer, accord­ing to peo­ple famil­iar with the matter.”

No one knows how this will play out, though I think it’s likely that Friend­Feed will even­tu­ally be folded into Facebook.

Friend­Feed in the news

• First Inter­view After Acqui­si­tion With Friend­Feed And Face­book (TechCrunch)

• The Cost Of Friend­Feed: Roughly $50 Mil­lion In Cash And Stock (TechCrunch)

• Face­book Just Bought Friend­Feed (RWW)

• Face­book Acquires Friend­Feed (PC Magazine)

• Is Friend­Feed the Next Con­ver­sa­tion Plat­form? (briansolis.com)

• Paul Buchheit’s blog

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.