Facebook Acquires Gowalla

Author JoeDigital

Facebook announced this week the purchase of Gowalla, a geo-social networking site that allows users to tag their locations and tell friends what they are doing by “checking in.” Gowalla is similar to Foursquare, its more popular competitor.

In a blog post, Gowalla’s founder, Josh Williams, announced that the site was shutting down and that none of its user information was being transferred to Facebook. Effectively, then, this means that Facebook is purchasing Gowalla’s talent and its capabilities – not its data or its product.

Gowalla was founded by Williams and Scott Raymond in 2007. In addition to letting users identify their location and seek out the location and current activities of friends, Gowalla further provides a Passport feature where users can share the locations of places they have visited and collections of photos from those places. It differentiates itself through this focus on “social travel.” With Gowalla, instead of using a site like Anywho.com to see where your friend is calling from, all you need to do is log on and see if they’ve checked in. Although Gowalla’s membership was dwarfed by that of other social media sites, the company had received $8.4 million in funding two years ago and is reported to be profitable and growing. Nevertheless, it will cease operations in January as part of the Facebook deal.

Facebook, for its part, has tried multiple times in the past to harness geo-social capabilities. Last year, it tried to buy Foursquare but could not arrive at a deal. Foursquare later received an injunction of venture capital money and continues to independently operate. Facebook also tried last year to start its own geolocation service: Places. That service no longer exists. These days, the networking site allows for location tags when making status updates or uploading photos, but there is no stand-alone geolocating feature.

Facebook’s acquisition of Gowalla doesn’t immediately change this, however. Since, as aforementioned, the social networking giant is planning to shut Gowalla down and not take any of their user data (likely due to privacy concerns), Facebook’s true intention here is talent; Gowalla’s founders and top talent are all switching jobs as part of the deal.

The talent involve here seems to ultimately be key, making this move less of an acquisition and more of a hiring spree. In recent weeks and months, Facebook has been quite public about its search for top talent. It has sent CEO Mark Zuckerberg on an East Coast recruiting tour, opened up an engineering office in New York, and announced its intent to hire thousands of new workers in the next year. Facebook is growing, and it wants the best and the brightest. Add in the ability of Gowalla’s team to track user locations for advertising means – a talent much sought-after in the industry – and Facebook has itself a pretty good deal.
The two companies refrained from disclosing any financial details of the acquisition.

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