You just don’t know it yet.

Facebook just purchased the rights to nearly everything you do on the Internet. And it cost them only $47.5 million.

Facebook's purchase of FriendFeed, an obscure social media platform, is potentially momentous. To understand why, we must understand FriendFeed, a startup that is ubiquitous among techies and unknown to everybody else. It's a sleek application that acts as a clearinghouse for all of your social media activities. Post something to Flickr? That will show up on your FriendFeed page. Digg something? FriendFeed will know. Post to Twitter from your phone? FriendFeed will syndicate your tweets. Once you initially tell it where to look, it will collect everything and tell it to the world.

The goal is to make automatic that which is all too annoying to do manually. If I like an article enough to Digg it, why should I then have to tell all my friends via Facebook or Twitter, as well? The social media landscape has become disparate enough—so many startups controlling so many different pieces of our lives—that we need a central place that will organize all of our actions for us. That place is FriendFeed.

Facebook has recently shown that  it, too, wants to be that place. For all of its procrastinatory genius, Facebook has usually asked you to come to it. For example, want to post photos on Flickr but not Facebook? Good luck telling your Facebook friends about it. In the past, while Facebook was building an audience, this kind of walled garden helped build its audience. If all your friends were on Facebook, then why not post your pictures there? After all, the point of digital photography in 2009 is to relive memories with the very group of people that lived through them in the first place. That group is most likely found on Facebook.

But now Facebook's user base is big enough for it to start looking out. There's a Twitter app that synchronizes your tweets with your Facebook status message. And then there's Facebook Connect, the company's convoluted and potentially genius attempt to make Facebook the official login for the rest of the Internet. Sites that support Facebook Connect—about 15,000 and growing—let users log in using their Facebook credentials in order to do things like leave comments on articles and blog posts. That activity—that the person left a comment—is then pumped back into her Facebook profile, which then promotes the site where the comment was left. Everybody wins ... especially Facebook, which gets more content and more of an off-site footprint.

So here's a theory: FriendFeed is going to become the companion to Facebook Connect; Facebook Connect pipes Facebook out to other sites, while FriendFeed's technology pipes other sites in.