Social networking website Facebook today acquired rival social networking site FriendFeed in an undisclosed deal that sees all management and staff of FriendFeed transfer to Facebook.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said since he tried FriendFeed, founded in 2007, he had admired its team for creating a simple and elegant service for people to share information.

Under the terms of the deal FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams, while the remainder of its 12 staff will be absorbed into the Facebook team.

Industry pundits are already speculating that the expertise of FriendFeeds founders is likely to be the reason behind the acquisition, with all four founders - Bret Taylor, Paul Buchheit, Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh - having played key roles at Google for products such as Gmail and Google Maps.

Bret Taylor, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps, said the two companies share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends.

“We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world,” he said.

Paul Buchheit was the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto.

According to Facebook, FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.