In a move that quickly swept across the media landscape, Facebook announced that it had acquired Friendfeed, a single platform for receiving updates from more than 60 Web sites, including Twitter, Flickr and YouTube, for an undisclosed sum. The deal comes at a time when Facebook wants to leverage its audience of 250 million active users into a service that approaches a real-time social broadcast, an idea that touches on one possible future of search engine technology – social relevance. But with such an established user base, is this a play for Friendfeed’s product or a talent grab?

Fast Company examines the acquisition, taking the former perspective, saying “Friendfeed has is universality: it acknowledges that some people are on Facebook, yes, but plenty of other are on Twitter and Gmail, and all those people want to talk to each other using one simple interface.” They note that Facebook’s biggest challenge is maintaining relevance. While it excels at connecting people initially – much like a phonebook in their view – all of its other services – updates and messaging- are merely adequate, giving users little reason to keep going back. Rolling Friendfeed’s model into that of Facebook might eliminate some of its simplicity, but it reestablishes Facebook as a social networking home base.

According to the Silicon Valley Insider, however, the deal was all about the people behind the platform – of Friendfeed’s 12 employees, all but one are engineers. They lay it out simply, pointing to Facebook’s desire for “FriendFeed’s 11 engineers, its ex-Google cofounders, who helped build products like GMail, Google Maps, etc. and their ideas, primarily to be built into Facebook.”

Regardless of your particular point of view (and barring the financial details of the deal) it’s hard not look at this buy as a big win for Facebook, as they make further inroads into transforming their site from a destination to a multi-use platform. Now if only they could figure out a way to monetize their service beyond the advertising model, Facebook’s dominance might really mean something.

[image via jaycameron]