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Facebook Acquires Location Sharing Service Gowalla

Posted 6th December 2011 by Andrew McCracken     Email article      Share article

Social networking giant Facebook is snapping up the location sharing service provider Gowalla. Is this the end of Gowalla as we know it? Facebook officially announced its most recent ‘Hire’ on Monday (5^th December 2011) confirming that it has purchased the brains and the mastermind behind the face of the location based service Gowalla. Facebook stated that they are not acquiring Gowalla’s service or technology,

“Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other members of the Gowalla team, are moving to Facebook in January to join our design and engineering teams.”

Facebook added, “We’re sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time.”

There was a moment in Gowalla’s lifespan at which they were competing on a head to head basis with top of the market location service Foursquare, which provides a way to check in at different places online and send this information to different contacts. Since then Gowalla have refocused their efforts elsewhere and Facebook launched its own check-in service last year.

During an event last week in New York, Facebook announced their intention to add a new engineering team to focus on their check-in system. Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said: “We will hire as many high quality engineers as we can.”

Facebook, which has over 3,000 employees and 800 million active users, previously had engineering teams only at its California headquarters and in Seattle.

In a blog post (Gowalla’s company blog)  Gowalla co-founder Josh Williams wrote that he was contacted by Facebook over a month ago about joining forces. He added “Gowalla’s service will wind down at the end of January, we hope some of the inspiration behind Gowalla- a fun and beautiful way to share your journey on the go- will live on at Facebook.”

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