Here are some of the facts that you need to know about the Facebook acquisition of Friendfeed.

Yesterday, the internet was buzzing about the acquisition of FriendFeed by Facebook for a whopping $50 million in cash and stocks. The world’s largest social network just boosted their technology in real-time updates, conversations and search.

Facebook said it will buy FriendFeed, securing an elite group of prized ex-Google engineers in the fast-growing Internet business of social networking and media.

One bridge between Facebook and FriendFeed might have been Matt Cohler, Facebook’s former management vice president.

Facebook said the founders will hold senior roles on its engineering and product teams. FriendFeed’s four founders are former Google Inc employees who count well known products like Gmail and Google Maps among their accomplishments.

In a statement, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he admired the FriendFeed team for having created a service he described as simple and elegant.

“As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use”, said Zuckerberg.

No details of the deal were released and both parties said the FriendFeed app would continue to operate as normal for the time being.  We’re still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team, Taylor said.

All of FriendFeed’s 12 staff will move over to Facebook, with its four founders winning senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

The social networking battle continues as Facebook buys the feed organizing app and looks to real-time search.

Arranging real time information has always been difficult because it is hard to differentiate the conversations from the chatter. There are times when the relevant talk just gets buried in a flood of useless chatter. The new Facebook will crawl the last 30 days of news feed and bring you results.

Aggregation of real time content and conversations via machines is the heart of this deal. Do they help or do they hinder, and where are the worlds of robotics and artificial intelligence headed? Friendfeed gives Facebook an automated way to pull in multiple sources of user information and data that is being shared.

So if you post photos to Flickr, a tweet to Twitter or write on your blog, it will all show up on your Facebook page. FriendFeed is a feed aggregating app, which lets users bring all their social networking sites together. So if you post photos to Flickr, a tweet to Twitter or write on your blog, it will all show up on your Facebook page.

Co-founder Bret Taylor said on the FriendFeed blog : As my mom explained to me, when two companies love each other very much, they form a structured investment vehicle.

One possible future for Friendfeed is it’s continued existence, untouched by Facebook proper (aside from possible integration with that Facebook Friend Connect service). Facebook has been well-served by Friendfeed’s continued existence thus far by simply watching what works there, and then recreating those features within Facebook itself.

And right after the acquisition news came the update from Facebook that they are rolling out the new Facebook Search which will enable users to search for status updates, photos, notes, images and links. Facebook has effectively nipped one of its major shortcomings in the bud: to somehow index and arrange the millions of data flowing through the social network.