Josh Williams of Gowalla, the moment sharing platform, authored a slightly vague yet decisive blog post this morning. The short and skinny of it is that Gowalla is heading to Facebook and the original service is coming to a halt.
The blog post reads like a good-bye letter, citing some history as well as triumphs the service has had in the past. It gets to the point fairly quickly — Gowalla, as we know it, is shutting down and the teams will be working together with Facebook in the future.
One thing the blog post doesn’t get into, however, is how this merger came to be. There is no mention of an acquisition, just that the sharing service, which launched on the same day as Foursquare, was going to be “winding down” and moving to California to work with Facebook.
About two months ago, my co-founder Scott and I attended F8. We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. 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 to join Facebook!
With Facebook’s continued development of the Timeline feature, it’s a smart move to implement a service like Gowalla. The move will allow a more robust and meaningful ‘moment sharing’ feature in Facebook, though with the Gowalla user base being so small, and the technology not that groundbreaking, I have to ask why Facebook didn’t just code it themselves. However, it’s nice to see a company paying to acquire ideas, instead of outright ripping them off at any chance they get.
We are hearing that several of the current Gowalla employees will remain in Texas where the company was founded, but will be working out of a satellite Facebook office.
