FriendFeed Launches Service for Discovering and Discussing Information among Friends

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--FriendFeed Inc. today announced the official launch of FriendFeed, a site where people can stay up-to-date on the Web pages, photos, videos and music that their friends and family are sharing. Additionally, the company announced that it has raised $5 million in Series A financing from co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh and Benchmark Capital.

"FriendFeed’s talented and creative team shares a passion for creating great user experiences,” said Peter Fenton, general partner at Benchmark Capital. “As the volume of information online grows exponentially across a broad array of Websites, FriendFeed enables the most powerful form of sharing—that which occurs amongst friends—in a simple, compelling manner.”

The goal of FriendFeed is to make content on the Web more useful and discoverable by leveraging users’ existing social connections. FriendFeed users get a customized feed of content—from news articles to family photos to interesting links and videos—shared by people they know.

“FriendFeed offers a unique way to discover and discuss information among friends,” said Bret Taylor, FriendFeed co-founder. “It’s a great way to sift through the overwhelming amount of information available on the Web. FriendFeed has the information that you care about, because it's from the people you care about.”

FriendFeed currently supports more than 25 Web services, including popular sites such as Flickr, YouTube and Yelp. There is no software to download or install as the company’s crawling technology automatically imports and updates what users are sharing on sites across the Web.

“The beauty of FriendFeed is that it’s so easy to use,” added co-founder, Paul Buchheit. “It takes only a couple of clicks to share a link or start a discussion with friends. It makes everything you’re already doing on the Web a little more social.”

Released in late 2007 for private beta testing, FriendFeed is now publicly available at friendfeed.com. “We've made a lot of improvements based on early user feedback, and we’re excited to open FriendFeed up to a larger audience,” said Mr. Buchheit.

About Benchmark Capital

Benchmark Capital, a leading international venture capital firm, was founded in 1995 to help talented entrepreneurs with original ideas build successful technology companies. Benchmark's general partners take a team-oriented, labor-intensive approach to venture investing to deliver a superior level of service to the firm's portfolio companies. Benchmark's portfolio includes high-profile start-ups like Infinera, MySQL, OpenTable, Second Life, Tellme, Yelp, and Zillow, and franchise companies such as eBay, Juniper Networks and Red Hat. The firm manages nearly $2.8 billion in committed venture capital. For more information on Benchmark Capital, visit its website at www.benchmark.com.

About FriendFeed Inc.

FriendFeed combines innovative technology and social solutions to make content on the web more relevant and useful. FriendFeed was founded by former Google employees Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh, and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. For more information, please visit friendfeed.com.

FriendFeed is a trademark of FriendFeed Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.