FriendFeed was set up in 2007 by Bret Taylor and (right, the humourist) Jim Norris, who helped build the Google Maps application, and Paul Buchheit (left) and (lower right) Sanjeev Singh, part of the software team behind Google's Gmail programme. It has some 46,000 active users. Facebook has close on 250m.

While  Google's searches are at the speediest, news static, based on snapshots of the internet, FriendFeed's  allows queries to be made in real time, leading Google founder Larry Page to praise such websites and admit his own site had fallen behind. However, FriendFeed does not group all its offerings on one site, so users must dig around to discover, say Rooms or groups and the 30 day challenge

Facebook reportedly paid $50m (£30m) in cash and shares for FriendFeed, which analysts had expected would be bought by Google or even Twitter. As well as capitalising on the search, Facebook will also aim to incorporate some of FriendFeed's other tools, allowing users to bring together pictures, videos and other content from social networking sites.

Wolfram for New Knowledge Sites (NKS)

That other science search engine Wolfram can now offer 5,000 demonstrations and codebase since launch has grown by 52%FriendFeed was started by Bret was a Group Product Manager at Google, where he launched Google Maps, the Google Maps API, and founded Google’s Developer product group

WolframAlpha codebase since launchhas grown by 52%—adding well over 2m  lines of Mathematica code. There have also been nearly 50,000 manual groups of changes to its data repositories over the past 3 months. Based on new source files,  between 10% and 15% new knowledge domains have been added.

There’s also infrastructure development. Making WolframAlpha run well on more web browsers. Optimizing performance, it’s now always just WolfrAmalpha  a seemingly minor change reflecting a large engineering effort to optimise load balancing between our co-location facilities. Work on new delivery and interface mechanisms for WolframAlpha are expected to be announced quite soon.