Facebook has announced today that they will be acquiring FriendFeed.  This is not a shocker because Facebook previously made an attempt to buy out Twitter for $100 million in cash and the $400 million in stock.  Over the last year, Facebook has rolled several FriendFeed-like features into the social network.  One of the features they took from FriendFeed was the concept of “Like.”

One of FriendFeed’s popular features is that the more comments a story receives on the news feed, the more it floats up to the top.  This concept is similar to the Reddit and Digg homepage.  FriendFeed’s voting system is real-time, but Facebook’s news feed popular stories constantly has to be refreshed.

As part of the acquisition, FriendFeed’s team will be joining Facebook.  This includes Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.  Buchheit was responsible for early stage development of GMail over at Google.

Facebook sent out a press release regarding the acquisition.  Check it out after the jump:

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For those of you that own an iPhone and don’t like the fact that the e-mail function doesn’t have built-in search, a company called ReMail has fixed that issue by creating an application.  ReMail started from the Y-Combinator incubation firm started by Paul Graham.

Currently the application is in Beta and is for free.  While Apple’s iPhone Update 3.0 is expected to have a mail search feature built-in, it will not be as advanced as ReMail’s application.  The iPhone will be able to search for keywords in the subject line of e-mails but not the body of the e-mails.

ReMail has a server that is optimized for e-mail search on the iPhone and offers suggestions as you type.  For the most part you have to be connected to the Internet to use the search feature, but the application also has a caching system to pull messages stored from the last two weeks.

Gabor Cselle is the founder of ReMail. Gabor has done work on GMail and Xobni in the past. Recently he completed a Master’s thesis titled Organizing Email. FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit and Sanjeev Singh have also invested in ReMail.

The biggest drawback of ReMail is that they pull your e-mail and store it on their servers using IMAP. They do this to optimize rapid search. However messages are encrypted for your privacy and the company vows never to access or read any e-mails unless there is written permission by a larger authority.

The ReMail application is presently available for free when in Beta mode but after that there will be a $3.99 per month charge.

Below is a screenshot pulled from TechCrunch:

Paul Graham has made the VCs open their wallets once again.  Y-Combinator has raised $2 million from Sequoia Capital and several other angel investors.  Up until now, only Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell were the sole investors in Y-Combinator companies.

Through this round of funding, Y-Combinator will open a new investment arm.  Y-Combinator will also be able to increase the number of companies that they invest in ever year.  They wil go from about 40 companies per year to 60.  Y-Combinator invests about $15,000 per startup.  Before Y-Combinator invested about $5,000 for 6% equity in the company and provided startups with office space and other resources.

Some of the companies to come out of Y-Combinator include Snipd, heysan!, Weebly, Addmired, Justin.TV, Tipjoy, Songkick, Disqus, Dropbox, Anywhere.FM, Loopt, Scribd, Xobni, Reddit, and Omnisio.

Greg McAdoo of Sequoia led the investment.  Some of the angels that joined in the investment include Ron Conway, Paul Buchheit, and Aydin Senkut.

[via VentureBeat]