14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook’s rumored location feature is getting more mysterious by the day as more and more people are wondering what is taking the site so long what it could possibly come up with to be worth the wait. The truth may be that Facebook is just taking its time because it can afford to, at its size it can probably squash even the most powerful players in the location-based services market with minimal effort. Whatever the case, Facebook has just acquired Nextstop, a startup providing social recommendations and reviews.
“When we started nextstop just over two years ago, our goal was to make it dramatically easier to discover great things to do anywhere in the world,” an announcement on the company’s site read.
“It's with that goal in mind that we have some big news to share today: nextstop has been acquired by Facebook. What this means is that we'll be joining Facebook and that Facebook has bought most of our assets,” it continued.
Facebook has bought the company for the talent; Nextstop was created by a couple of ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who worked on Google Calendar, the first, and Google Groups and Picasa, the second. With Nextstop they wanted to add a social layer to place recommendations and reviews.
The two will be joining Facebook and they say they will be working on similar products in the future, so it’s safe to assume it will have something to do with Facebook’s upcoming location features. Unfortunately for Nextstop users, this means that the site will close down.
Users have until September 1st to export their data, which they’ll be able to do with the export tools provided. The company will also be releasing all of the recommendations and places data it has gathered so far under a Creative Commons license under the hope that other people or companies will find it useful.