Facebook just announced that it is acquiring FriendFeed. All FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will keep their 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," says FriendFeed Co-founder Bret Taylor. "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,” says FriendFeed co-founder Paul Buchheit. "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."

Buchheit was the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s "Don’t be evil" motto.

"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 a pretty useful service, and has some important real time search functionality that could be a huge step in that area with Facebook behind it. Perhaps FriendFeed will get some more attention from the mainstream now.

Friendfeed is based in Mountain View and is comprised of 12 employees. Friendfeed.com will continue to operate as is for now. Financial terms were not disclosed.