this afternoon that it has agreed to buy for an undisclosed amount of money. Mountain View, Calif.-based FriendFeed's 12 employees will join Facebook's crew and its four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook's engineering and product teams, according to Facebook.

"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, in a statement. "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, founded by four former Google Inc. employees in October 2007, offers a service that acts as a social networking aggregator, consolidating updates and posts from Web sites, blogs and microblogs like Twitter.

"This is probably a smart move for Facebook, giving them ownership over a social network aggregator and allowing Facebook to make their site the overall hub for social networking," said Dan Olds, an analyst for The Gabriel Consulting Group. "Assuming that Facebook can establish itself as a social networking hub for its users, this offers Facebook several advantages. The first is that it will keep users on Facebook pages longer, which means greater exposure for Facebook advertisers and higher ad rates. The stickier Facebook can become for users, the more revenue they can make from their advertising."

relying heavily on venture capital and little on earned income, isn't adverse to making big purchases.