Facebook certainly know how to pick their battles. In the past 24 hours, there have been 2 major announcements in the form of acquisitions to challenge Google and a new lite service to take on Twitter.

Yesterday saw the social network site buy the content sharing service FriendFeed, snatching the company from right under Google’s nose (It was expected that Google or Twitter would buy FriendFeed.) The reason a content sharing service attracts the attention of Google and Facebook is due to its impressive real-time search engine – something Google has fallen behind in.

FriendFeed allows you to synchronise with a
whole range of social networking websites.

Facebook and FriendFeed have had quite a close relationship in the past, with Facebook using (and improving on) some FriendFeed features, and FriendFeed importing/synchronising Facebook updates to their user profiles. The FriendFeed development team are also all ex-Googlers, which is a great addition to the Facebook team.

There have also been reports of a new Facebook Lite service, which will most likely line itself up against with it’s stripped down, straight-to-the-point interface focusing on status updates. (This may also work well with Facebook’s username functionality that was added a few months back.)

Combining all of these new features sounds like a great idea. A Twitter-esque profile pointing at http://facebook.com/phcreative showing a public version of my profile, which then utilises the new FriendFeed technology to synchronise and publish real-time status updates, links, photos and blog posts from Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Last.fm, BrightKite, etc. Combine all that with a mobile / iPhone app and you’re on to a winner!