...might need to set their sights on Facebook instead.

News has broken in the last day or so that Facebook has acquired social networking site Friendfeed for around $50 million.

Here is the official statement from FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor:

The FriendFeed team is extremely excited to become a part of the talented Facebook team.

Weve always been great admirers of Facebook, and our companies share a common vision. Now we have the opportunity to bring many of the innovations weve developed at FriendFeed to Facebooks 250 million users around the world and to work alongside Facebooks passionate engineers to create even more ways for you to easily share with your friends online.

What makes this such big news is that Facebook can now get started on their recent plans to introduce real-time search to their social network. Facebook announced in June their intentions to build real-time search engine to rival Twitter and now it seems the FriendFeed acquisition is another step in the right direction.

How will FriendFeed help in this plan? FriendFeed rolled out real-time search recently which I think will be able to make Facebooks search features better. FriendFeed also generates a lot of conversation, something Im sure Facebook would like for its own website.

While Google has another option to partner with to aggregate real-time search data, this is not such good news for Twitter. Facebooks plans will really put pressure on Twitter to try and come up with a point of difference. Twitter is good at what it does, there is no doubt about that, but if it doesnt advance with the times, then it might get left behind.

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