FriendFeed Sale Influenced by Google Buzz?

Thursday, February 11, 2010

FriendFeed Sale Influenced by Google Buzz?

FriendFeed, the real-time web aggregation startup founded by Paul Buchheit, was acquired by Facebook in August 2009. The timing of the acquisition is suddenly very interesting to me.

A number of Google employees, including Sergey himself, have said that Google Buzz has been live and actively used internally inside Google for the past 6 months, which means it launched in August 2009, the same month as the FriendFeed acquisition.

Paul Buccheit, as the founder of Gmail and friend of many current Google employees, likely knew about Google Buzz when it launched internally, despite the fact that he was not a Google employee then. Many bloggers see very strong parallels between Google Buzz and Friendfeed… Best of all, here’s Paul’s own response when Buzz when public yesterday, “This seems vaguely familiar…”:

So, did Paul sell FriendFeed at least in part because he knew Google Buzz was coming soon? Paul might have thought that Buzz would be directly competitive with FriendFeed, but with better placement in users existing workflow, and so August was the best time to sell.

Or, it could just be a coincidence.