Two-year-old social network enhancing service Friend.ly has been acquired by Facebook, announced the Friend.ly blog earlier today.
Friend.ly is a place where people can get to know each other based on random questions you might have in common. Answer a question posed by the service, and you’ll be able to see how other people have answered that question. You can also search for a question by typing it into the site’s search bar.
So, are you ready to get even more friend.ly with Facebook?
For example, I typed in the phrase “how many,” and the following questions popped up:
If you can’t think of a question, you can click on the Questions tab at the top of the page, and then you’ll get a list of questions you can choose from, along with everyone else’s answers to those questions.
You can answer as many questions as you want, meaning Friend.ly will only acquire as much information about you as you are willing to give it.
Getting Friend.ly with the Facebook Interest Graph
Friend.ly bases the questions it asks you on the Facebook interest graph, pulling from a user’s Likes and the Likes of their friends, says InsideFacebook. After answering the questions, you can share your answers to your Facebook wall, Twitter, or the wall of a page related to the question.
The acquisition of friend.ly comes fresh on the heels of Facebook’s frictionless integration featuring music sharing service Spotify, which allows all of your music activity to show up on the real-time news ticker and your own news feed as “Recent Activity.” Facebook already knows what kind of music you like. With acquisition of Friend.ly, it will know even more about your personal life.
Facebook’s List of Acquisitions Continues to Grow
At the beginning of 2011, Facebook announced that it would acquire 15 companies in 2011. In August 2009, Facebook acquired FriendFeed, which was expected to change Facebook a great deal. While Facebook has utilized some of the FriendFeed real-time commenting technology and adopted FriendFeed’s focus on making the social networking experience more public, it doesn’t currently play a big role in Facebook as a whole.
Friend.ly brings an added layer of data based on the social graph based directly on questions, which will help Facebook get even friendli.er with you.
What do you think Facebook will do next to learn more about you? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
