MUMBAI: Facebook has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online for $50 million.

As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

"Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends. We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world," said FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor.

"As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it," added FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s "Don’t be evil" motto, added, "It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group."

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information. As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use," said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.