Facebook-FriendFeed marriage guarantees future of social media d**ch*bags

Filed under: Social Software, Analysis, web 2.0

What do you get when you take a gaggle of enthusiastic, early-adopting online marketers and introduce them to one of the world's largest directories of job-seeking college students? We're about to find out, now that Facebook is acquiring FriendFeed. The move should mean improved versions of the real-time status and conversation features that Facebook was already moving toward, but that's not all Facebook bought. It's also getting most of FriendFeed's users.

It's not as if social media, um, d-bags, didn't know Facebook existed. Au contraire, they've been all over it for at least a year, begging people to become fans of their clients. College students, however, are about to find out that social media jobs exist, and are one of the best rackets going. Wait, you mean I can bother people online, using networks I was already signed up to anyway, and get paid for it? When do I start?

Social media isn't going away any time soon, and it has a lot of upside, but it also has a lot of our attention. It's one of the few places marketers can still get eyeballs, and members of the first generation that really grew up with it are about to enter the workforce and start selling things to one another. Maybe it was inevitable -- and maybe it will burn out after a while, to make room for new models based on new technology -- but I'm willing to bet we'll look back and point to the time FriendFeed met Facebook as the moment it really started to accelerate.

Facebook-FriendFeed marriage guarantees future of social media d**ch*bags originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 10 Aug 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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