Image via FriendFeed

Bret Taylor of FriendFeed broke the news today that the social aggregator service has been purchased by none other than Facebook. In the short term, things will remain the same as they've always been. But Bret's post on the company blog suggests that plans are already afoot to integrate FriendFeed into the current black hole of social networking.

Image by Robert Scoble via FriendFeed

Facebook is bringing out some major changes to their service in the next week. One of the most visible changes will be its new website design, despite only having the current one for about nine months. And with this new design, their ripping-off of lifestream aggregator FriendFeed seems to be complete.

Image by Mickipedia via Flickr

Twitter is a great platform for making short announcements, or to send a quick reply to one. But as a conversation platform, Twitter is sorely lacking. And yet people keep trying, and then take offense when others point out the obvious – that Twitter conversations are awkward, hard to follow, and unnecessary, thanks to services like FriendFeed.

If you're a FriendFeed user, you've probably heard about FriendDeck before. If you haven't, what FriendDeck does is allow you to watch your FriendFeed stream the same was you can watch Twitter via TweetDeck. It's a pretty neat web application.

Note how web is crossed out? Yeah. FriendDeck is now available on the desktop as well.

Image via CrunchBase

FriendFeed is a great online tool, as I've said before. It aggregates updates from a number of different services, and makes it easier to share with friends and other people what you've been saying and doing online. The FriendFeed team continually adds new services and features to the site, but there remains a few good services which the team should get added, right away (at least in my opinion):

Here's a list of the communication, Web 2.0 and social networking sites and tools that I've come to love the most over 2008. The list is by no means exclusive, but these are the ones I've had the most experience with, and wouldn't ever want missing in my online life.