At the time of the acquisition, FriendFeed said there were no immediate plans to take the site down, even as the team turned its attention to Facebook. But the news was so fresh that plans still seemed up-in-the-air. Cofounder Bret Taylor, who is now Facebook’s director of product, was asked about FriendFeed at Facebook’s developer conference f8 today. He reaffirmed that even though Facebook won’t be developing or improving the service, there are no plans to take FriendFeed down.

“For all two of you out there, thank you, FriendFeed users,” Taylor said.

Presumably, Facebook has found a compromise that allows it to avoid aggravating FriendFeed users without having to devote serious resources to the site. If that balance becomes unfeasible at some point (i.e, if Facebook needs to focus real manpower or money to keeping the site running), I expect FriendFeed’s status to change.

It’s a somewhat more ambitious effort than the one launched recently by Glam competitor Federated Media, which is helping Twitter find ways to monetize its traffic with things like ExecTweets and MarchTweetness.

Tinker doesn’t just help users follow topics they’re interested in; it also gives advertisers the chance to advertise within a microblogged conversation based on that conversation’s content. And Glam says it’s making the opportunity a safer one for advertisers by giving them filters and controls to make sure their brands don’t appear next to harmful or inappropriate content.

Tinker will consist of conversations from professional microbloggers (journalists and bloggers from several well-known networks including Federated Media, BlogHer, TotalBeauty and others are openly invited to join) as well as from regular users. Advertisers can use their filters to keep their ads out of conversations by users they don’t trust. Volunteers chosen by Glam will also be able to flag conversations as offensive or inappropriate.

And there’s an incentive for professional microbloggers to take up Tinker’s invitation to join what it calls its “Tinker Micro-Blogging Network”. Glam will calculate posts and page views and offer micro-revenue sharing with content creators. This is a first, to my knowledge. “TwitterMoms” is one of the first such networks.

The company said it launched the service today with over 100,000 posts by more than 25,000 people on 200 events in popular categories including Awards, Causes, Conferences, Fashion, Festivals, Movies, Music, News, Politics, Sports and TV. Techcrunch, which is also reporting the news, has a nice chart showing where some of the activity is. Below, you’ll see that the streams around the shows American Idol and Lost are the most popular so far.

Events can be private, with invites and permission required to join the conversation, or public social events, where anyone can connect and participate. Tinker has created something called Tinker Trends, which lets users see top events and breaking news and chart which events are rising and growing socially in popularity.

Tinker also lets users create widgets so that they can share Tinker conversations on their web sites or blogs. It packages ads on these shared widgets so that publishers and distributors can share in the revenues.