FriendFeed is a real-time feed aggregator that consolidates the updates from social media and social networking websites, social bookmarking websites, blogs and micro-blogging updates, as well as any other type of RSS/ Atom feed. It is possible to use this stream of information to create customized feeds to share, as well as originate new posts-discussions, (and comment) with friends.

The goal of FriendFeed according to their website is to make content on the Web more relevant and useful by using existing social networks as a tool for discovering interesting information. Users can be an individual, business or organization. Bloggers writing about FriendFeed have said that this service addresses the shortcomings of social media services which exclusively facilitate tracking of their own members' social media activities on that particular social media service, whereas FriendFeed provides the facility to track these activities (such as posting on blogs, Twitter and Flickr) across a broad range of different social networks. Some bloggers are concerned about readers commenting on their posts inside FriendFeed instead of on their blogs, resulting in fewer page views for the blogger.

Paul Buchheit is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He was the creator and lead developer of Gmail. He developed the original prototype of Google AdSense as part of his work on Gmail. He also suggested the company's now-famous motto "Don't be evil" in a 2000 meeting on company values, although the phrase was introduced earlier at Google in 1999 by Amit Patel, one of Google's first engineers.

Buchheit grew up in Webster, New York and went to college at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He worked at Intel and later became the 23rd employee at Google.

Buchheit was a founder of the startup FriendFeed, which was launched in 2007 and was acquired by Facebook in 2009, in a private transaction.

In 2010, Buchheit left Facebook to become a partner at the investment firm Y Combinator. From 2006 (when he started investing) until 2008, Paul invested about $1.21 million in 32 different companies. He also continues to oversee angel investments of his own, in (by his own estimate) "about 40" startups.

Bret Taylor is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He was the co-creator of Google Maps and the Google Maps API. Taylor left Google in June 2007 to join venture capital firm Benchmark Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, where he and Jim Norris, another former Google employee, created the social network web site FriendFeed. Taylor was the CEO of FriendFeed until August 2009, when the company was acquired by Facebook for an estimated $50 million. Taylor is currently the CTO of Facebook.

Taylor also co-wrote and maintains Tornado web server. The software was created at FriendFeed and was open-sourced after FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook in 2009.

Taylor attended Stanford University, where he earned his bachelor's degree (2002) and master's degree (2003) in computer science.