Facebook has turned up the heat on Google by purchasing content-sharing service FriendFeed, say industry watchers.

工业动向检测者发现，Facebook通过购买FriendFeed的内容共享服务，在搜索引擎上与Google较劲。

Many expected Google or even Twitter to buy the company, which has been praised for its "real-time" search engine.

This type of search is valuable because it lets you know what is happening right now on any given subject.

"Google look out, Facebook knows the real money is in real-time search," said respected blogger Robert Scoble.

"Google is the king of regular search. FriendFeed is the king of real-time search. This makes the coming battle over this issue much more interesting," Mr Scoble told the BBC.

Back in May, Google founder¹ Larry Page admitted that the search giant had fallen behind other services like that of Twitter, which boasts nearly 45 million users worldwide.

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they (Twitter) have done a great job.

"We've done a relatively² poor job of doing things that work on a per second basis（基础，根据）," Mr Page said at the time.

'Warning shot'

Many in Silicon³ Valley agree that this deal has changed the game.

"Facebook was unable to acquire Twitter so this is the next best option," said Ben Parr, associate editor of Mashable, a news blog covering social media.

"FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate⁴（聚集，集合） everything they do online and do it all in real time.

"With this acquisition（获得）, Facebook is gunning directly not only at Twitter, but at Google. This is a warning shot to those two companies," Mr Parr told BBC News.

Mr Scoble noted⁵ that FriendFeed's real-time search could stretch back 18 months compared to a few days for Twitter.

Silicon Valley commentators⁶ have long regarded FriendFeed as an inspiration for many of Facebook's features.

These include the ability for users to import activities from third parties services like YouTube and Flickr to letting users comment or say they "like" something in another user's feed.

"FriendFeed has in effect been the R&D (research & development) department for Facebook for some time now," said Mr Scoble, who is one of the service's most popular users with nearly 46,000 subscribers.

"They have the best community technology out there and Facebook should continue to use them to try out new features and test them out before transferring them over to Facebook."