Previously rejected by Twitter, Facebook has bought FriendFeed, instead. The official release is on Facebook, and FriendFeed’s Bret Taylor has posted about it on the FriendFeed blog.

Though Facebook has long been competing with MySpace for social networking supremacy, it’s been eclipsed in some ways by the immediacy of Twitter and, to a lesser degree, FriendFeed. While Facebook has become more Twitter-like recently, it’s still a different animal altogether.

In buying FriendFeed, Facebook gets a very similar set of tools as if it had bought Twitter (some would say a better set of tools). FriendFeed recently launched its own real-time search tool that looks remarkably like the search experience on Twitter (and also see What Is Real Time Search? Definitions & Players).

All 12 FriendFed employees will join Facebook now, and the four FriendFeed founders — all ex-Googlers — will take “senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams,” the release says. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

There’s more discussion on Techmeme.

(Note: Headline changed after one person pointed out a possibly offensive meaning in the original that was unintended.)

Related Topics: Channel: Social | Facebook | Search Engines: Real Time Search | Top News

About The Author: Matt McGee is Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. His web career continues to include a small number of SEO and social media consulting clients, as well as regular speaking engagements at marketing events around the U.S. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. See more articles by Matt McGee

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