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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.

Interesting observation made over at Transcosmic that the swift migration from Myspace to Facebook rivals the same social patterns indicative of white flight from cities to the suburbs in the past. 

At a keynote speech during New York’s Democracy forum at Lincoln Center, Danah Boyd spoke of the racial disparity and possible reasons for mass abandonment of MySpace for the “more cultured” and “less cheesy” social networking site Facebook. Boyd, a social media researcher for Microsoft and fellow of the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, stated: “We might as well face an uncomfortable reality … what happened was modern day ‘white flight’.”

Boyd also observed that: “The fact that digital migration is revealing the same social patterns as urban white flight should send warning signals to all of us. It should scare the hell out of us.”

What he doesn’t mention in the piece is the reasons many people left Myspace for Facebook.  In my particular case, the preponderance of profile spam – hookers, bands, automusic tracks, ads plastered over 80% of the screen, etc. etc. became overwhelming on Myspace. 

Facebook was a place that I could manage a digital rolodex of friends, aquintances, and contacts without worry.  The user-interface is far superior.  With that said, this isn’t a race issue per say, despite the user profiles.  If Facebook ends up doing the same things as Myspace, you’ll their user-base crumble as well. 

Update: Just found the original paper, “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” the article was based upon and it’s much more nuanced and a far better read than Transcosmic’s piece.

Time’s Lev Grossman counts the ways:

1. Facebook is about finding people you’ve lost track of. And, son, we’ve lost track of more people than you’ve ever met. Remember who you went to prom with junior year? See, we don’t. We’ve gone through multiple schools, jobs and marriages. Each one of those came with a complete cast of characters, most of whom we have forgotten existed. But Facebook never forgets.

2. We’re no longer bitter about high school. You’re probably still hung up on any number of petty slights, but when that person who used to call us that thing we’re not going to mention here, because it really stuck, asks us to be friends on Facebook, we happily friend that person. Because we’re all grown up now. We’re bigger than that. Or some of us are, anyway. We’re in therapy, and it’s going really well. These are just broad generalizations. Next reason.

It’s a bit comical, but you get the sense there is some truth in this.  Just as when Facebook replaced Myspace, it seems that now everyone I know has migrated to Twitter.  I barely log in to Facebook anymore and couldn’t tell you the last time I logged in to Myspace.