FriendFeed was founded in 2007 by four former Googlers: Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Paul Buchheit, and Sanjeev Singh. Before leaving Google, the guys helped design and launch several well-known products, including Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Groups. FriendFeed was their vision for a centralized sharing service — kind of like Facebook, only without all the extra stuff. It’s basically a content aggregator:

And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter.  Is this a marriage made in heaven?

Mark Zuckerberg and FriendFeed Co-Founders Celebrate Deal

Zuckerberg posted a photo of himself along with FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit, James Norris, Bret Taylor to his Facebook account, with the caption “Photo from our negotiation / signing party last night with the FriendFeed founders.

Twitter.com subject to a so-called denial-of-service attack, according to the firm’s official blog. Denial-of-service attacks take various forms but often involve a company’s servers being flooded with data in an effort to disable them.

The outage began Thursday morning but the geographic scale of the attack is still not known!
“On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack,” said company co-founder Biz Stone on the company’s blog. 08/06/2009

Sent to CNN.com by Biz Stone, a Twitter co-founder:

“There’s no indication that this attack is related to any previous activities. We are currently the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we defend and later investigate.”

08.07.09

Twitter Service Spotty as Attacks Continue (New York Times)

A massive denial-of-service attack that disabled Twitter for much of Thursday continued on Friday. Twitter said its defenses are keeping the site largely accessible to users, but some third-party applications, such as TwitterBerry for BlackBerry smartphones, are still having problems accessing the service. (Here at The Times, we’re having trouble getting on both through apps and the Twitter.com site — tell us your experience in the comments.)