It’s a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social-media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world.

The goal is to make automatic that which is all too annoying to do manually. If I like an article enough to Digg it, why should I then have to tell all my friends via Facebook or Twitter, as well? The social-media landscape has become disparate enough — so many start-ups controlling so many different pieces of our lives — that we need a central place that will organize all of our actions for us. That place is FriendFeed.

Facebook has recently shown that it, too, wants to be that place. For all of its genius in harnessing the collective procrastination of an entire planet, Facebook has usually asked you to come to it. For example, want to post photos on Flickr but not Facebook? Good luck telling your Facebook friends about it. In the past, while Facebook was building an audience, this walled garden helped it build its audience.

If all your friends were on Facebook, then why not post your pictures there? After all, the point of digital photography in 2009 is to relive memories with the very group of people that lived through them in the first place. That group is most likely found on Facebook.

But now Facebook’s user base is big enough for it to start looking out. There’s a Twitter application that synchronizes your tweets with your Facebook status message. And then there’s Facebook Connect, the company’s convoluted and potentially brilliant attempt to make Facebook the official login for the rest of the Internet. Sites that support Facebook Connect — about 15,000 and growing — let users log in using their Facebook credentials in order to do things such as leave comments on articles and blog posts.

That activity is then pumped back into the author’s Facebook profile, which then promotes the site where the comment was left. Everybody wins — especially Facebook, which gets more content and more of an off-site footprint…

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Facebook Inc. said it has acquired FriendFeed, a start-up that allows users to share links and status updates online, folding in a potential rival that struggled to take off.

Facebook paid nearly $50 million for the company, in a combination cash and stock offer, according to people familiar with the matter. The company paid roughly $15 million in cash, with the rest in Facebook stock that vests over several years and would be worth roughly $32.5 million based on the $6.5 billion common valuation an investor recently placed on the company. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment.

FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by four former Google Inc. software engineers as a way for users to keep track of their friends’ activities across social-media services — like Facebook and Twitter — at the same time. But it never expanded far beyond a core group of Internet professionals, particularly as other services like Facebook made it easier for users to share their articles, photos and notes across multiple social-media services.

In an interview, FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor said that both companies have been casually talking about joining forces for a while, but that talks really accelerated “in the past week.”

All 12 FriendFeed employees and the founders, will join the company — a boost to Facebook’s cadre of engineering talent. Mr. Taylor said the team is likely to work on the technology that allows Web developers to integrate features of Facebook onto their own sites. Facebook has been pushing those tools to make it easier for users to keep in touch with their friends when they aren’t on Facebook. But the efforts are still in an early phase.

Mr. Taylor, who also declined to comment on the terms of the deal, said Facebook will continue to operate FriendFeed.com as a standalone site for now but aims to eventually integrate the products.

In the past year, Facebook has matched a number of features from FriendFeed, whose technology — including the speed at which it updates — have received strong reviews from industry professionals. But after swift growth, FriendFeed’s traffic has seesawed. It had 989,000 unique users in June, according to comScore, compared to Facebook’s 340 million. Facebook last year failed to acquire Twitter — a microblogging service which, like FriendFeed, enables users to share links and content online.

Monday, Facebook also launched a feature that lets users search the stream of items their friends share or other users make public for terms like celebrities or news events. Previously, most of the search functionality Facebook built for the site was focused on finding particular people.

Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

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Yes, ducks float by you in the background (and over FriendFeed elements) and you shoot at them with your mouse cursor.

Each time you click over a duck, you will hear a shotgun sound, and you will hear the duck squeak ? its death sound. Of course, you can’t miss, because that likely involves clicking on a link on FriendFeed (which would ruin the functionality of the site).

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