Facebook has added an extra 10 people to its girth. On Monday it was announced that the social networking giant acquired Mountain View, Calif. based startup friend.ly, a company that makes a question & answer Facebook app. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.
The startup was founded in 2010, a little later than San Francisco based competitor Formspring, and inspired a total of $5 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Balderton Capital and a few others. Friend.ly is a little less personal than Formspring’s question & answer and also differs by drawing from Facebook information on your profile to ask targeted questions.
The acquisition of friend.ly was announced in a company blog post today. The team said they were “excited and thrilled to be joining such an innovative company.”
Facebook soon confirmed in a statement: “We’re excited to announce that we recently acquired friend.ly, a Silicon Valley startup that created a really compelling way for people to express themselves and meet others through asking questions. We’ve admired the team’s efforts for some time now.”
GigOM points out that the acquisition seems to be an “acq-hire”. The 10-person friend.ly (including CEO) squad will continue on the way its been going as a separate service from Facebook, but they will be working on new projects for Facebook.
Facebook’s question & answer plan is not going for the depth of Quora, and friend.ly seems to be aligned to that vision with the startup’s short and social Q & A setup. Facebook relaunched its Questions app back in March of this year. Hopefully the company’s new efforts don’t go the way of Google’s Aardvark which was shut down in the beginning of last month along with nine other projects.
