Facebook to be the Huffington Post of your social media?

There’s been a lot of discussion happening in the days following the snapping up of Friendfeed by Facebook. Some like Steve Rubel wondered if we would see a rush of Friendfeed “refugees” heading to Facebook since he was already experiencing an impact of sorts

I am in no hurry to make changes but I am already starting to see Friendfeed have an impact on Facebook indirectly.

I have pretty well put Friendfeed on the back burner sometime ago but I do think there were, and maybe still are, some questions that could do with being answered

Even though Friendfeed is still around and people are still adding to its massive database of information that we have no idea of what will happen to, one has to wonder why we are even bothering.

It isn’t like there is going to be any pot of gold at the end of the rainbow when the day comes and the door is finally closed on every Friendfeed room. Sure they announced the cool feature of users being able to design and save their own themes – but really who cares?

Louis Gray though still holds out hope that Friendfeed will be around for awhile to come

Meanwhile, if you expected them to stop using the site, they haven’t. After a few busy days following a practically sleepless weekend prior to the deal’s completion, the founders have started posting again. They’re not going away, and neither are we. Hopefully, they will talk a lot more about what the acquisition means – as much as they are able – soon. But for now, I’m going to keep using FriendFeed,[….]

Then along comes a post from Chadwick Matlin at the Washington Post suggesting that Facebook’s intent by buying up Friendfeed was to cement its place as the leader in social aggregation.

Instead, I think this is about social aggregation. Facebook bought FriendFeed so it could become the Huffington Post of your social life.

Right now the majority of your news feed is filled with updates that your friends have (for the most part) made within Facebook. Status updates, engagements, zombie bites — it all shows up in your news feed. But those are all internal to Facebook; everybody spends plenty of time outside Facebook, as well. And in order for you to track your friends’ activities you either have to subscribe to all of their different feeds or hope that they tell you when they add content to one of their other profiles. That’s a hassle.

What you need is an aggregator — a place to come that gives you a news feed not just of what’s happening inside your walled garden, but also what’s going on elsewhere, too. A Facebook/FriendFeed mash-up — FaceFeed, we (and many others) will call it — would be exactly that.

It is still early days of the acquisition of Friendfeed and really the only ones who know what is going to happen to Friendfeed are the people who signed the deal for $50 million (cash and stack) but I’m inclined to agree with what Duncan Riley (the man behind The Inquisitr) said in response to Louis’ post on Friendfeed