More surprisingly, the acquisition was something like Sixth Sense where you watched the movie trying to figure out what the ending would be just to be totally blindsided as the credits rolled. Yeah, it was that sort of satisfactory “ah, you got me” moment.

I have had a torrid relationship with FriendFeed culminating with a termination of my account, causing much angst and name-calling from the puppets who have pushed FriendFeed as the only way to have legitimate conversations on the web. From my perspective, and others, it was a noisy, troll-filled social platform that, though having good technical features like real time feeds, also provided an almost cliché approach to communication.

Where the web has become increasingly fragmented and dispersed, fans of FriendFeed often touted it’s aggregation platform as the end of disbursement, a concept that I disagree with. Such end of disbursement also marks an end to competition, if allowed, and a navel-gazing mentality that assumes nothing can be better. Competition in the market place is good, and I chose Twitter.

What this means to consumers is unknown yet. Facebook has a historic closed stance and, though opening up certain APIs such as Facebook Connect, and allowing developers to develop applications for Facebook, it still stands as a relatively closed system. In order to really engage with Facebook, you really have to be using Facebook itself or the mobile apps built for Facebook.

FriendFeed has a robust API that developers can access to distribute or repurpose the content within. It has failed in many ways by not providing a really great application ecosystem, but on paper, it is much more robust of an open system than Facebook.

Facebook has certainly taken pages from the FriendFeed book, however, making their newsfeeds real time, and integrating their “Like” feature. However, it still is not as quick or reliable, much less intuitive for the user.

In an ideal world, Facebook takes almost all of the real time, and “Group” functionality of FriendFeed and integrates it into Facebook. Lose the walled garden, and keep the API open for developers. Time will tell, however, as these two companies figure out how to be “In a Relationship” with each other.

More on this acquisition from other sources:

• TechCrunch: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• ReadWriteWeb: Facebook Just Bought FriendFeed
• Boomtown/Wall Street Journal: Facebook Acquires Non-Twitter, Oops, Friendfeed (Plus the Full Press Release)

• Aaron can’t pronounce Dave’s last name.
• David will be running the site and Splashpress Media will be operating it.
• The status of Nick Wilson and Patrick Gavin – they will continue to develop the Scribefire plugin (formerly Performancing for Firefox).
• The goals and intents of Performancing going forward revolving around community and ad sales and metrics.
• The surprise that is the Performancing purchase/turnaround.
• Competing with Text Link Ads?
• CPA Network for bloggers? Is that really effective?
• Is there a new approach to blog advertising in the future of Performancing?
• Keeping the Performancing brand?
• Music by STAN.

Update: Title updated. Partners was not sold. Performancing.com was, however. Via Darren.