Facebook Pulling the Plug on FriendFeed in April

The once-popular social feed aggregator FriendFeed will be winding up and shutting down on April 9 this year. The service, bought by Facebook in 2009 for $15 million in cash plus $32.5 million in Facebook stock, is no longer popular among users and as a result, is no longer viable to run.

Information on the coming shutdown was conveyed through FriendFeed's official blog, which posted for the first time in nearly six years to let the user community know that the service was shutting down on April 9. The last posts before that were from August 2009, soon after the startup was acquired by Facebook.

The service has already stopped accepting new sign-ups. Existing users can still sign in and view posts, messages and photos till the cutoff date of April 9, after which the service will go completely offline. The blog post has cited a continuously reducing user base as a reason for winding up the service, with its current user base being a fraction of what it once was.

In its prime, the aggregator service was used to assemble a list of user-specific content from a variety of sites and services, including Blogger, Tumblr, Reddit, Last.fm, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Netflix, and many more. The service was founded in 2007 by former Google employees who had been involved in the development of Gmail and Google Maps.

Facebook was most recently in the news for adding a 'free-form field' for users to describe their gender identity, essentially providing an 'infinite' gender selection option above the 58 choices it had earlier provided.