Facebook Extends Itself By Acquiring Gowalla

If speculation in the media today is anything to go by, then Social networking giant, Facebook has continues to expand its service by acquiring Gowalla, a location sharing service.

The Timeline was presented at this year’s F8 conference and is currently rolling out to Facebook’s 800 million members. Some Gowalla employees will stay in Austin and work out of Facebook’s local office there.

The Gowalla team will be working on Facebook Timeline, with most of the team moving to Facebook’s Palo Alto headquarters and some remaining in Gowalla’s hometown of Austin, where Facebook has an office as well, CNN reported.

The new product moves away from displaying a time-based feed of your friends’ recent check-ins, and focuses instead on creating Stories around the places you and your friends have visited, clustering together photos that show off your adventures (there is also a Guides section that lays out where you should visit in a given city).

In other words, it’s not too dissimilar to Facebook’s Timeline feature, which is also designed to group clusters of activity into more cohesive stories, as opposed to just a reverse-chronological feed. And it would make perfect sense for Facebook to start featuring location checkins and photos tagged with GPS coordinates into Timeline stories.

The Facebook’s deal has not yet been publicly announced yet but the source that preferred to stay anonymous commented saying: “It’s a perfect match. As far as the big picture, Gowalla’s vision is about people telling stories, and Facebook’s vision for Timeline is about stories about important moments in life.”