Ars Technica reports that "social networking giant Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. This deal reflects Facebook's growing fixation on the social stream, but it's hard to see how the two services will be merged. [...]

[Facebook's] powerful but esoteric SQL-like query system all add up to a steep learning curve. By comparison, FriendFeed has a simple and elegant API that exposes a lot of information and is much more accommodating to developers."

It seems to me that streaming SQL is the correct solution to this problem. Not a SQL-like language, not an API (although you of course have to use an API to execute queries and get the results), and not just traditional SQL on finite relations, but SQL where streams are a first-class construct.

I'm not a big believer in …