Facebook Buys Rights To "Nearly Everything You Do Online" For $47.5 Million

washingtonpost.com:

Facebook just bought the rights to nearly everything you do online. And it cost them only $47.5 million.

Facebook's purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social-media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a start-up that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It's a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world.

Read the whole story: washingtonpost.com

Comments

[LovesMyWay]

No privacy on FB and the FB police are there! Here's how it works - get on, enjoy and they police things and ban people and patrol - it's crazy.

[smartcookienyc]

What's a Facebook?

Is it anything like that suburban high school year book that's probably been sitting in the bottom of a drawer I haven't opened in a decade. Damn, I hope that isn't on acid-free paper.

Frankly, I wasn't so keen on the whole idea then.

[berrycooda]

Who needs a census....

Won't be long and the whole country can be counted on facebook
twitter etc.

Wonder if the word "twitter" came from the old saying...
A little bird told me....

[norkas]

I know someone that quit slaming several fingers up his nose as if he was looking for buried treasure because he was geeeing allot of call about a photo of him doing it.

Some people were asking for training sessions with him becaue he had his fingers all the way to his elbow.

Face book is a great product

[Mike Barden]

Alls I wanna know:

Is the check in the mail?

[gemswinc]

Simplify life-turn off wifi.. Who ARE
those 100's of twitter/facebook friends?

[gemswinc]

Bad enough posting in haste w/ out
having your blooper re-broadscasted

[gemswinc]

Then there is going off-line and living
in real time [ oops ]

[lukebenward]

Oh, so we have another eBay-buying-Skype. "Ooh, someday, this is _really_ going to pay off. Mark my words. Just you wait and see. It's coming."

[Rickter]

Heck, I'd sell them the right to know what I do online, as boring as it is for a few hundred grand...

Where do I sign up for my check?

[Faxus]

I guess that would be true if I used any of those time wasting doohickies, but I don't.

[Lendall]

I like Facebook because it is a way to meet new people, around the world, who share my interests, which happen to be artistic and intellectual, and even somewhat esoteric within those categories. (Call me an elitist. Fine with me.) My new Facebook friends are an unparalleled source of information via their comments and the links they post. Eighty percent of my Facebook friends are people I have never met, and may never meet. I have no relatives on Facebook, partly because I share no interests with my relatives. Some of my friends on Facebook are quite prominent in their fields. In short, I really like it. I understand that if you just want to share baby pictures with your family and friends you really don't need Facebook. But I have no baby pictures to share. Just interests and ideas.

On the "Friendfeed" thing, my objection is that I want to preserve my anonymity to blog and comment here and on other sites. Just because I write a comment on Huffington Post does not mean that I want to take my Facebook friends' time with it. Their interests (as I said before) are artistic and intellectual, not political (with a few exceptions). And honestly, politics is getting pretty discouraging. I suggest that you turn off your computer now and read Giles Deleuze.

[tuberider]

Make that PURPLE please. Witha dash of mustard.

[tuberider]

Uh, can I just have the puple kool-aid?

[blessedfrog]

face book is a fun way to keep up with far away pals tho

[ywcachieve]

You can do that in other ways.

[ckesegi]

You mean those with whom you've had no contact in years?

I wouldn't have been able to re-connect were I left to the constraints of organic means, so I would like to know what alternatives are at our disposal to do so.

[bzb]

There are all sorts of other ways to keep up with your friends. I just have a real privacy issue with FB posting my every move online.

[mnwildfan]

Seems to me it affects you only if you are on one of the social networks, not everything you do online. Very misleading headline.

[Solja]

as usual