SAN JOSE, Calif. — Facebook announced Monday that it
has hired the team behind the location-sharing service Gowalla, but will
not acquire nor integrate the current service offered by the Austin,
Texas-based company.
Gowalla co-founders Josh
Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other Gowalla workers, will join
the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social network’s design and engineering
teams in January, according to a Facebook statement. Neither company
announced any price Facebook paid in the deal.
“While
Facebook isn’t acquiring the Gowalla service or technology, we’re sure
that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over
time,” a Facebook spokesman said in an email.
The
move follows a developing pattern for Facebook and other Silicon Valley
technology companies to acquire other companies strictly for their
personnel.
For instance, in August, Facebook
acquired Push Pop Press, which created imaginatively interactive
e-books. Like the Gowalla purchase, Facebook at the time said that “the
ideas and technology behind Push Pop Press will be integrated with
Facebook.”
Facebook announced last week that it is
opening an engineering office in New York after opening a similar
office in Seattle in 2010, part of the company’s effort to expand their
search for top-notch talent.
Facebook has
location-sharing functionality within its framework, allowing users to
tag status updates, photos and more with their location. But separate
location-sharing apps that interact with Facebook, such as Foursquare,
have proved to be more popular than Facebook’s offerings.
Gowalla
launched in 2007 as a mobile application that allowed users to “check
in” at locations. The company launched a redesigned app in September
that featured guides to cities around the world collected from users,
who were encouraged to use their check-ins as “stories,” full-fledged
descriptions of areas and events to which others could add.
About
the same time the new Gowalla appeared, co-founders Williams and
Raymond attended Facebook’s f8 Developers Conference, and “were blown
away by Facebook’s new developments,” Williams wrote in a blog post
Monday detailing the move.
“A few weeks later
Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have
the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce
that we’ll be making the journey to California,” Williams added.
Gowalla
said in September that it had a 30-person team, but neither company
detailed exactly how many of those workers will be moving to Silicon
Valley to work for Facebook. The Gowalla service will eventually stop
functioning near the end of January, Williams said, but users will be
able to transfer all their data, which Facebook did not acquire.
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©2011 the San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
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