"Facebook is reckoned to have spent around $50m ($15m in cash and the rest in its own stock) acquiring FriendFeed, a social networking site that employs a team of 12 people, of whom eight are former Google staff. Although FriendFeed's users number about 250,000 – a minnow compared with Facebook's 250 million – some had thought it offered a path through the perplexing proliferation of such sites: integrating on a single page whatever you did or posted on Facebook, Twitter or dozens of other sites, and creating a "feed" like Facebook's personal "wall" for each user. But the real key was the team behind it: Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Sanjeev Singh and Jim Norris left Google in mid-2007, set up FriendFeed in October and made it public in February 2008. They raised $15m venture capital, making Monday, when the deal was done, a fairly successful payday for investors. The founders' track record at Google is impressive and explains why Zuckerberg was keen to get their expertise on board. Buchheit, the 23rd employee at Google, came up with its "Don't be evil" motto. He also developed the prototype of its lucrative AdSense program while developing the Gmail webmail service. Singh worked on Gmail and the Google Search Appliance for companies while Taylor was group product manager for development of Google Maps. The challenge for Facebook is to stay ahead of Google. To do that, its founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg knows that he has both to limit Google's access to Facebook's content – because letting it index all of Facebook's millions of pages would simply give up advertising revenue to the search giant – while making Facebook easier to navigate and search than it is now. And he needs to find ways to serve more relevant adverts, so that he can keep bringing in the money to keep expanding the site. The FriendFeed team will in effect become Facebook's research team, trying to find ways to implement that improved search and pull people who would otherwise be using external networks – particularly Twitter – on to Facebook. Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be more than a place to talk to your friends: ultimately, he wants it to be an internet in itself where his company knows what is going on all the time." - Dan Smith