Facebook said today it is acquiring FriendFeed, the online content-sharing site.

It is a logical fit for the huge social networking site, which has lagged behind microblogging kingpin Twitter in the real-time news, search and status game of perception in Silicon Valley.

Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed has also trailed well behind Twitter, despite its top-notch pedigree of ex-Google (GOOG) staffers, such as Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. The other ex-Google co-founders of FriendFeed are Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh.

Benchmark Capital and angel investors had put about $5 million into the start-up, which had been a darling among the digerati.

Despite that, the start-up only broke one million unique visitors recently, according to several reports, while San Francisco-based Twitter was reported to have upward of 44 million in June.

But FriendFeed will surely get a turbocharge from its Facebook ownership, especially as its technology is fed to its 250 million users.

While Facebook–which is based in Palo Alto, Calif.–has added some of the same functionality that FriendFeed has innovated into its famous News Feed, it will surely get its own boost from adding FriendFeed’s dozen employees, 11 of whom are engineers.

Terms were not disclosed, but the purchase price is likely well under the $500 million Facebook offered Twitter last fall.

In fact, sources estimate to me that the price was about $50 million in cash and stock for the company, which was founded in 2007.

It is also unclear what will happen to the standalone FriendFeed service in the long run, although Taylor said in an uber-cute blog post (see below) that it would remain intact for now.

This move, although prominently unmentioned by Facebook in its full press release below, is most certainly a shot across Twitter’s bow.

Here’s the official word from Facebook, as well as that blog post by FriendFeed’s Taylor about the acquisition:

Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed

PALO ALTO, CALIF.–August 10, 2009–Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. 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,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “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.”

“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,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. 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,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “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.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.”

FriendFeed accepts Facebook friend request

We are happy to announce that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle…

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team. We’ve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebook’s passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

What does this mean for my FriendFeed account?

FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being. We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team. As usual, we will communicate openly about our plans as they develop–keep an eye on the FriendFeed News group for updates.

What about the FriendFeed API?

The FriendFeed API will also continue to operate normally. As above, we will let you know as we settle on our plan to more fully integrate with Facebook.

Check out the official press release for more information.

Back on April 7, Tim Armstrong sent a memo to the long-battered troops of AOL about a 100-day vision quest the new CEO and chairman was going on to find out “how to bring back the magic of AOL.”

It is now Day 86, and Armstrong is closing in on the end of a Where’s-Waldo commitment that he made then to visit all of the far-flung offices of the Time Warner (TWX) online unit globally.

More importantly, as it is almost over, Armstrong also has to make good on another promise he made in that memo he sent to the staff on his first day:

“The culmination of the 100-day process will end in Dulles with an All-Hands meeting in mid-July. At that meeting, we’ll review the feedback we’ve received–both internal and external. We’ll also discuss our strategic direction for the coming years, and highlight areas that will bring AOL and AOL properties into the next decade of digital leadership. Most importantly, we will set a course and focus all of our resources to make that course a success.”

BoomTown is eager to see what Armstrong has found out on his trip and what path it will ultimately put AOL on.

So far, the broad outlines of his strategy seem to center on expanding AOL’s content assets, strengthening its advertising network and getting out of businesses the company cannot compete well in, such as social networking.

What other pearls of wisdom Armstrong has gleaned are to still to be revealed, presumably.

His corporate version of “The Amazing Race” is certainly a novel idea, born at his first all-hands meeting in Dulles, Va., which used to be the world-wide HQ of AOL and remains its heart.

There, Armstrong (pictured here) joked to the crowd:

“I know that work goes on across the globe and, in the first 90 days, I’m going to try to visit every office we have and sit down and talk to every employee and that will be something that my wife has actually agreed to let me do so.”

Thus, spouse-approved, the former Google (GOOG) exec has circumnavigated the globe and has held meeting with employees in a wide range of places: Dulles; New York; Baltimore; San Francisco; Mountain View, Calif.; Toronto, Lancaster, Pa.; Denver; Hamburg; London; Paris; Bangalore; Dublin and, this week, Tel Aviv.

But it has not been all tourism, in search of innovation.

During this time, Armstrong has also dispatched employees and top execs, such as advertising head Greg Coleman and communications and communities head Joanna Shields, and hired a few key staffers of his own; announced a pending spinoff of the company; and bought some stuff (including a company he funded).

It will be interesting to see what comes next–after the 100-day gathering in Dulles, which should come sometime after Armstrong’s July 15 deadline, of course.

Party on, Tim.

In that vein, we have recently added two new features over the last few weeks, both of which deserve a look-see: Topic pages and job listings.

The first is our attempt to offer a new and easier way for the ATD audience to navigate specific information, by gathering in one place a selection of blogs, columns, videos and photos on the site, all related to a single popular topic, all without requiring a user to search via keywords.

The variety of our topic pages will grow over time. But right now we have special pages for the Apple (AAPL) iPhone 3GS, the Palm (PALM) Pre, the new Bing search service from Microsoft (MSFT) and news from Apple’s recent Worldwide Developers Conference.

Secondly, we’ve partnered with Simply Hired to offer paid job listings on AllThingsD.com, right from the front page. Starting this week, you’ll find Simply Hired widgets with current job opportunities on pages across our site, including here.

Recruiters can post jobs directly to the ATD jobs page, and these listings are also distributed to more than 5,000 partner sites in Simply Hired’s network, including GigaOM, Mashable and WashingtonPost.com.

(Full disclosure: Simply Hired, which is based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised some of its funding from the News Corp. (NWS) digital unit, Fox Interactive Media. News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

In a move that many in the Silicon Valley chattering classes were certainly wondering about, former Yahoo exec Jeff Weiner has been named CEO of LinkedIn, the largest social network focused on professionals.

Weiner (pictured here), 39, who has been the president of the Mountain View, Calif.-based company since late last year, will also join the board of directors.

Current CEO, Chairman and founder Reid Hoffman–whose second title will be slightly changed to executive chairman and who will continue to work on a daily basis at LinkedIn–said the move was not part of the preparations for an initial public offering but because Weiner had already been handling the duties of CEO for some time.

“Jeff has really had our team reporting to him and has been doing a lot of what a CEO does for months now,” said Hoffman. “So, we wanted to project that to the world what was already projected internally.”

Before coming to LinkedIn, Weiner ran the Network division of Yahoo (YHOO), putting him in charge of most of its consumer offerings.

He left the Internet giant a year ago and did a brief stint as an executive-in-residence at two Silicon Valley venture firms–Accel Partners and Greylock Partners–before joining Linked in December.

Weiner listed a number of priorities moving forward, including scaling the network, increasing the user base and engagement, improving user experience and product ease, juicing up search, further expanding internationally and strengthening the platform and third-party developer relationships.

Phew, but he left out improving the food in the cafeteria!

“We have done a lot over the last six months to really grow this professional network,” said Weiner, who noted that the company had beaten its internal projections. “And we are positioned well to reach our full potential.”

For now, to both Weiner and Hoffman, that means growth and further girding the bottom line.

LinkedIn, which said it has 42 million members world-wide, has a more diversified business model than other social-networking sites, with “three lines of revenue, including premium subscriptions, corporate solutions and advertising.”

Hoffman said the company was profitable in 2008 and is expected to be profitable in 2009, although he declined to provide either revenue or profit figures.

One striking figure, of course, is the more than $100 million in funding LinkedIn has gotten since it was founded, which had given it a massive valuation of over $1 billion.

That’s why many have been watching for either an IPO or a sale of LinkedIn. Many possible acquirers have been bandied about in the past, including News Corp. (NWS), which owns Dow Jones, owner of this site.

But Hoffman discounted either path for now.

“We are entirely focused on building the company and not on the run-up you make for a public offering,” he said.

Added Weiner: “We are working on how you build a strong company for the long term.”

Here’s the official press release on the news:

LinkedIn Names Jeff Weiner Chief Executive Officer

Co-founder Reid Hoffman continues as Executive Chairman

Mountain View, CA–June 24, 2009–LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional network, today announced that Jeff Weiner has been named LinkedIn’s chief executive officer and appointed to the board of directors. Reid Hoffman will remain focused on LinkedIn in his day-to-day role as founder and executive chairman.

Since joining LinkedIn as interim president in January 2009, Weiner has overseen all operations and played a defining role in developing and executing the company’s strategy to address the accelerating demand for LinkedIn’s products and services on a global basis. “Working closely with Reid and the team over the past six months exceeded all of my expectations coming into the company,” said Weiner. “I couldn’t be more excited about our progress to date, and the opportunity ahead of us.”

“LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals,” said Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman, LinkedIn. “Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together.”

In the past year, LinkedIn has achieved records across virtually all key operating and financial metrics, most recently exceeding 42 million global members. LinkedIn has an established business model with three lines of revenue, including premium subscriptions, corporate solutions and advertising. The company operated profitably in 2008 and is expected to be profitable in 2009. LinkedIn has secured more than $100 million in funding from some of the world’s premiere investors.

Weiner brings more than 14 years of consumer web experience to the position. Prior to joining LinkedIn as interim president, Weiner was executive in residence at Accel Partners and Greylock Partners. He had previously held key leadership roles at Yahoo!, most recently serving as executive vice president of Yahoo!’s Network Division with responsibility for Yahoo!’s consumer web product portfolio, including Yahoo!’s Front Page, Mail, Search and Media products. In addition to LinkedIn, Weiner serves on the boards of DonorsChoose.org and Malaria No More. For more information, please see Jeff Weiner’s LinkedIn profile at: http://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffweiner08.

After running one of the more successful Silicon Valley acquisitions by Microsoft for several years, Tellme Networks founder and GM Mike McCue (pictured here) will be leaving the company at the end of June.

As part of the transition, Zig Serafin, who has been running a lot of the speech technology efforts for the software giant at its Redmond, Wash., HQ, is taking over the voice services subsidiary and all the other related units.

They will be made into a single, yet-unnamed, team with about 400 employees in total.

McCue and Serafin are now meeting with Tellme staff at its Mountain View, Calif., HQ about the changeover.

“It was time to move on, after a long and really successful time at a big company,” said McCue, in an interview with BoomTown two weeks ago. “Voice technology is an area that I think Microsoft is committed to excelling in and the new configuration will help ensure that.”

Serafin (pictured here), a 10-year Microsoft veteran, said as much in another interview yesterday. “This is an opportunity to bring together the group to allow it to innovate across Microsoft,” he said. “We really want to advance this user interface for computing.”

Serafin said he would be spending four days a week in Silicon Valley, as part of that effort, using Tellme as the center of a “whole new speech center of excellence.”

Microsoft (MSFT) has long been aiming at differentiating itself from the popular iPhone from Apple (AAPL), which has revolutionized the mobile market via its innovative touch and movement technology, by drilling down on making speech recognition technology a popular consumer application.

It bought Tellme in 2007 for $800 million as part of that effort. Competitors in the space include Google (GOOG) and Nuance.

For example, Tellme recently announced “one-button” voice access for Windows-enabled mobile phones, as well as some new technologies to improve call automation for customer service centers.

McCue has been a pioneer in the use of speech in the mobile arena, founding Tellme in 1999. Previous to Tellme, he was VP of technology at Netscape, the once-dominant browser company.

McCue said he will be taking some time off after he leaves Tellme and then plans on working on another start-up and advising companies.

Below is a picture from a 1999 board meeting at Tellme, when it was private. It includes McCue, as well as former Netscape execs Peter Currie and Mike Homer (click on image to make it larger).

And, below that, are two video interviews I did with McCue in March of last year.

One is a tour of the Tellme HQ and another is a longer chat with McCue–whom I once called the “Patty Hearst of Silicon Valley” for being so dang sunny in an Associated Press story about what life was like after a takeover by the software giant, in the midst of Microsoft’s failed attempt to buy Yahoo (YHOO).

In it, I noted that he displayed “the cheeriness of someone with acute Stockholm syndrome and $800 million in Microsoft money.”

Tellme HQ Tour:

McCue Talks About Mobile Devices:

Yahoo’s ranks keep fanning out all over the tech scene.

This time it is former top-ranking Yahoo exec Jeff McCombs (pictured here), who has signed on to be CFO of Tumri, an online advertising start-up.

Backed by Accel Partners and others, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Tumri is trying to crack into the online ad space with what it calls “dynamic and intelligent display advertising solutions.”

Essentially, using a product called AdPod, that means display ads that are delivered more easily and automatically with a relevant marketing message, depending on the consumer.

McCombs, 37, is a big hire for a small company like Tumri. He was SVP of Business Operations at Yahoo (YHOO).

At Tumri, he will be managing all financial activities, including financial planning and analysis, accounting, investor relations and corporate development. He will also be responsible for overseeing business development, human resources and legal.

Said Calvin Lui, Tumri president and CEO: “Jeff’s wide spectrum of experience will be instrumental in helping guide our explosive growth and will help solidify our innovation and leadership position. We are excited that Tumri’s transformative mission is attracting this high caliber of talent.”

Indeed, at Yahoo, McCombs had also served as chief of staff to former president, Sue Decker.

Previous to that, he worked at a number of investment banking, corporate development and private equity firms.

As CFO, McCombs will also be a key exec at Tumri, said Lui, helping steer its strategy.

“Making display ads performs better is the next great opportunity,” said McCombs, in an interview yesterday, noting that the sector needs to have similar ability to measure effectiveness as search ads do. “You need to be able to completely understand why one ad performs better than another online.”

Of course, that has nothing to do with the fact that most people think the Singleton speech was aimed at the search giant and its burgeoning power over the distribution of media, although Google was not named by him.

Still, it’s always nice to make nice. Sort of.

So, it was hard to resist translating this Google (GOOG) blog by one of its lawyers.

Google wrote: Some questions related to Google News and the Associated Press
Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 8:03 AM
Posted by Alexander Macgillivray, Associate General Counsel for Products and Intellectual Property

Translation: Questions? Someone has questions about our practices? OK, we will answer them only to assuage the panic among the little brains about our size and power over IP.

But remember: They don’t call us Googzilla for nothing!

Google wrote: Yesterday I entered the following search in Google News: [Phish in mountain view]. The search results led me to click on this headline, which took me to the full story by the San Jose Mercury News about Phish’s upcoming concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre.

Translation: Hey, we might seem like geeks over here at the Googleplex, chomping on organic flax crackers and making up scary algorithms, but we know of this hip Phish phenom. We looked it up under “hip” on Google!

[Complete digression: BoomTown was in a car pool with the very sweet Trey Anastasio for many years in middle school, and he was not such a hipster then!]

Google wrote: Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month. These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international–day and night.

Translation: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Google wrote: And once a reader is on the newspaper’s site, we work hard to help them earn revenue. Our AdSense program pays out millions of dollars to newspapers that place ads on their sites, and our goal is that our interest-based advertising technology will help newspapers make more from each click we send them by serving better, more relevant ads to their readers to generate higher returns.

Translation: Money makes the world go around,
the world go around, the world go around,
Money makes the world go around,
it makes the world go round.

A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound,
a buck or a pound, a buck or a pound,
Is all that makes the world go around,
that clinking clanking sound,
Can make the world go round.

Google wrote: The Associated Press (AP) recently issued a press release announcing plans to develop an initiative to “protect” the newspaper industry’s content online. Since then, some readers, users and journalists have asked us if the AP’s plan is about Google since we host complete AP articles. The answer is that it doesn’t appear to pertain to Google since we host those articles in partnership with the AP. We announced that partnership in 2007 as part of an experiment in hosting articles on our site. In hosting agreements such as this, we pay news agencies and display the entire text of articles, such as this one from the AP about President Obama’s visit to Turkey.

Translation: Ain’t nobody here but us chickens!

Hey, we pay up some! Not a lot! But some. I mean, YouTube doesn’t pay up and it has tons of content on the site that is not theirs.

Wait, we own YouTube. Forget that example.

Back to chickens. Nobody here!

Google wrote: We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models–whether news sources choose to host their articles with us or on their own sites, and whether their business model is ad-supported or based on subscriptions. In all cases, for news articles we’ve crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more–the headline, a “snippet” of a line or two of text and a link back to to the news publisher’s website.

Translation: Hey, we only give consumers a little smackeral, in the lingo of the great Winnie the Pooh. Well, yes, that bear does always end up gobbling all the honey. Forget that example.

Back to chickens then, but chickens with an advertising-supported business model!

Google wrote: In the U.S., the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the US Copyright Act allows us to show snippets and links. The fair use doctrine protects transformative uses of content, such as indexing to make it easier to find [pdf]. Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index–all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards such as robots.txt or metatags.

Translation: Oh yes, the fine print. Legal stuff–fair use, transformative, indexing. In other words, we’re covered, and 3,476 Washington lobbyists have our back.

But hey, here is some technical stuff and we’ll also take it out–all you have to do is ask, although it will effectively make you undiscoverable for all of time!

And, if you do then want us to take it out, comb through our gazillions of search results to find your stuff, over and over and over again, like gerbils on a treadmill. We totally hope that does not exhaust you in every way possible.

Google wrote: As for Phish in Mountain View this summer, asking will get you nowhere because the tickets are already sold out.

Translation: Also, for anyone keeping score, Phish owes us too, since no one would have found tickets without us. Google HQ is right smack up against Shoreline Amphitheatre, so we are watching.

So let’s review: Ozymandias, King of Kings. Chickens. Smackeral. Hip.

Nothing to see here, so please enjoy this lovely Phish video of “Bouncing Around the Room” from YouTube (relax, it’s from their official channel):

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Here is the letter AOL CEO Randy Falco (pictured here) has penned to the entire staff about layoffs of 10 percent of its workforce–or 700 people–and other cost cuts, which the online service is announcing today.

“We’re at a pivotal point in AOL’s transformation, and need to be even more strategically focused and operationally efficient as we weather the economic storm,” wrote Falco, in part, about the move.

As BoomTown reported earlier today, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL is making huge staff cuts, due to the weak economy and the ensuing deep falloff in advertising revenue, but also because of recent structural changes made to refocus the once-mighty service.

The layoffs will take place over the next several quarters, with most of the U.S. cuts to be completed by March. AOL has 7,000 employees world-wide, with most located domestically.

Here’s Falco’s letter:

Dear AOL colleagues,

I’m writing to tell you about some important decisions we’ve made about AOL’s business and why we’ve made them.

The deepening economic recession has affected every corner of the economy, including our own. Online marketers have tightened their ad buying across the board, reducing their spend by hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a result, we will be reviewing our entire organization to further align resources and expenses against the real revenue opportunities in this difficult market. Part of this will involve consolidating groups to gain efficiencies that will unfortunately lead to head-count reductions. We anticipate this will result in a net reduction of our workforce of up to 10% over the next several quarters–and we will attempt to finalize all domestic actions by the end of March. Reducing our workforce is never easy, particularly in the current climate, but our goal in doing this is to provide our core businesses the resources they need to thrive. Please know that, as always, we’ll be doing everything we can to help and support those affected, including offering severance packages and other services.

To further keep employment costs down, we will also forgo merit pay increases in 2009. This is a painful decision, but one that many companies have prudently taken to help minimize the number of layoffs they have to make.

To provide some perspective on these decisions, right now we’re two years into a three-year turnaround plan. Since day one, our strategy has focused on building and growing mutually dependent publishing, advertising and social media businesses to take advantage of the shifting media landscape. We’ve worked shoulder-to-shoulder to make considerable progress during this time.

We acquired best-in-class companies across the digital advertising space (AdTech, Third Screen Media, Lightningcast, buy.at, TACODA and Quigo, respectively) and integrated them with Advertising.com to build Platform-A, the largest, smartest display advertising platform in the world.

We grew our MediaGlow audience via an efficient content development model that in 2008 enabled us to launch more than 20 new sites that are generating significant page view (up 64% year over year in December), engagement (up 39% year over year) and unduplicated user (70+ million) numbers. This momentum will continue in 2009 with our goal of creating an additional 30+ editorially curated sites focused on consumer passion points.

We combined Bebo with our longtime community assets AIM and ICQ as well as newer acquisitions Goowy, Yedda and SocialThing, to build People Networks, gaining AOL a foothold in the critical social media space, with more announcements to come on the next phase of development in both the social media space and in the integration of social and publishing capabilities.

This progress continues to put AOL in a strong position to capitalize on our new business model when the recession ends.

In addition to focusing our investments, a successful turnaround plan also requires us to realign our cost structure against this three-pronged business model–making difficult decisions to cut costs in areas that aren’t critical to our growth. Splitting out the Access business improved the transparency of what’s working and what’s not, and allowed us to make better decisions about exiting businesses that weren’t performing while investing in growth areas. A successful turnaround plan also mandates we control costs, operate with healthy margins and position the company for sustainable growth. As you know, we’ve moved repeatedly to bring discretionary expenses in line to spare across-the-board job cuts.

But we’ve also had to make many hard decisions along the way. And this moment is no exception. We’re at a pivotal point in AOL’s transformation, and need to be even more strategically focused and operationally efficient as we weather the economic storm.

In addition to the head-count reductions and the 2009 merit pay decision, we are also making changes throughout the organization to improve efficiency and better align it to our three core businesses. This includes a review of our international operations and our global shared-services functions. In addition, we will continue throughout the year to carefully and thoroughly review all our products and services to make sure every one fully supports our strategy and has the potential for growth.

Finally, we are going to realize significant savings by continuing to consolidate our facilities–for example, moving from two buildings to one in Mountain View, from two floors to one in Los Angeles, and leasing unused space on our Dulles campus.

With these and other changes, we will take significant annual run-rate costs out of our business while, importantly, retaining the flexibility to invest in our growth strategy.

I know all this will raise questions, but I wanted to share as much as I could with you now. Senior management will provide more details as appropriate to their teams in the weeks ahead.

As difficult as things look right now, the economy eventually will turn around. Some companies will use this time prudently and make difficult decisions to come out of it in better shape–growing toward areas of opportunity, scaling back in others and maintaining a line on costs all around. Our only choice is to be one of these companies. With your continued hard work and dedication, we will position ourselves to emerge a stronger company ready to lead in a vibrant online market.

Randy

This morning, FriendFeed, which is a kind of content delivery version of Twitter, went international, launching in six new languages–German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and simplified Chinese.

Now live, the move is a natural extension for the Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up–which was founded earlier this year by a small gang of ex-Googlers: Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh. The company says that one-third of users already use FriendFeed in languages other than English.

More languages are planned, said the company, which specializes in super-aggregating updates of all kinds for social-networking and news items in an ongoing feed from places like Facebook, YouTube, Digg, Twitter and Flickr.

Given all the dissipated ways people communicate on the Web, FriendFeed lets users collect all these links, some of them in rich media and some just text messages, to share publicly or privately.

I find the service very useful and compelling, so I paid a visit to its HQ last week to chat up Taylor and Buchheit.

We talked about a range of topics, including–my favorite–monetization, or lack thereof, of a lot of terrific Web 2.0 services like FriendFeed and Twitter.

The pair, in a less overt manner than Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams, did acknowledge the focus on growth over revenue, although they did seem intent on figuring out a true business plan sooner than later.

FriendFeed certainly has time to do so–it is a small and inexpensive start-up with a dozen employees, funded with only $4 million from Buchheit and Singh and $1 million from Benchmark Capital.

Here’s the video (excuse my gruff-cold-and-cough voice):