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Comment by rokhayakebe | Hacker News Reader

With all due respect to Twitter, the FriendFeed acquisition at 1/10th of the cost was a better investment. You have the talents behind Gmail, and Google Maps (I believe), and now they are one of the largest consumer real time apps out there. It is also worth noting that they have done a great job at pushing new features live.

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Is talent really worth $15 M? Seems a little expensive for a couple of programmers.

I think FB got a great deal here.

They got ~10 top grade Google vets. Assuming they each have to stick around for 3 years,

$15MM/(10*3) = $500K/year each.

And the $35MM in stock = 0.54% of Facebook. Divide that by 10, and you get 0.05% per head, which doesn't seem extravagant at all.

It's the FF employees who are bearing most of the risk in this transaction, in the off chance FB isn't actually worth $6.5B.

It depends on how you leverage 10 top notch engineers. I'm guessing they wouldn't have done the transaction if they figure they couldn't get at least $50M in value from these guys which at Facebook's scale isn't that hard.

12 programmers, 1 million + users.

Now unlike Twitter, friendfeed is not made of a bunch of marketers following other marketers. If you follow someone on Tiwtter you get something like "Thanks for the follow. I am expecting to learn from you. Check my website...".

Also The discussion around a particular shared item on FF is easier to follow.

The number of users FF has that FB didn't already have is approximately zero.

Should make integrating the userbases pretty easy then.

... or pretty irrelevant.

I thought Google Maps was done by the Brothers behind Wave (at least the main two people behind it, same as the lead at FF was the main guy when it came to gmail).

It's both. The Rasmussen brothers founded a small desktop-app startup, akin to what became Google Earth, which was later bought by Google. Meanwhile, Bret Taylor was the PM for Google Local (and I think Jim Norris was involved with this too). Google Maps happened when the Local team met the Earth team and started talking about what they could do to get all this cool satellite imagery with desktop-like interaction into a browser.

Also, arguably Bret and Jim were the leads at FriendFeed, since they came up with the original idea. AFAIK, they approach PB and Sanjeev as investors, and the latter figured that not only would they invest, but they'd sign on as cofounders.

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