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Monday, December 05, 2011

Facebook buys Gowalla location service

Facebook has just acquired Gowalla which offers a service for sharing your location with friends. Gowilla is based in Austin, Texas. The Gowalla mobile phone app allows people to share the details of their location by checking in to different venues which also lets users to create a visual picture of their day.

Last year Facebook added a mobile device location tool called Places which let users check in to locations with their friends but recently scrapped the service and decided to roll the location sharing functionality directly into the status update bar.

One thing that Facebook is know for when acquiring another company is that they never leave the original product as is but instead decide to change it around to integrate it with Facebook. Some of the Austin based team will end up in Palo Alto, CA at Facebook, while a few will stay behind in Texas.

This new acquisition will mean that Facebook owns the data you entered into Gowalla but hopefully Facebook will give you a way to export your Gowalla data if they decide to shut it down.

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