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The general consensus seems to be two fold: business world is excited by the merger & acquisition; fanboys are, obviously, a bit more reticent.

In exchange for $4 Billion, Disney acquires Marvel’s staple of 5,000+ characters.  The news comes as a bit of a surprise for a deal of this magnitude.  The terms of the deal seem to be similar to the one they struck with Pixar several years ago, with Disney acting as a distribution/marketing side and Marvel obtaining creative control of their properties.

The most exciting news?  Pixar head John Lasseter met with Marvel executives last week, “about a possible team-up between Marvel and Pixar and got ‘pretty excited, pretty fast.’ They say there’s definitely an opportunity there.”  Yes, yes there would.  If nothing comes of this deal except Pixar being involved with Marvel Animation then it’s totally worth it.

Though I suppose, Disney ruining the Marvel characters by making them family-friendly would also be a terrible thing.

UPDATE: The L.A. Times weighs in on how Disney can broaden its brand with the purchase of Marvel. The Beat has a good roundup of news related to the deal, too.

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook has just acquired FriendFeed.  Details of the aquisition are sparse.

Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.

Shockingly, I don’t use either of these services as much as I should and in Friendfeed’s case, not at all.  My problem with Facebook is that it doesn’t understand it’s own usefulness by trying to emulate Twitter. 

Facebook = a digital rolodex; Twitter = realtime media wire.  It’s that simple.