While it was clear that Foursquare had already won the location sharing app wars long back, there is no doubt that another service known by the name “Gowalla” was fairly popular. But then, it could never match the popularity of Foursquare and always remained in the sidelines. In the long run however, it seems this seems to have done more good than bad for team Gowalla which has been lapped up by Facebook completely.
It was just last week that rumors about the possible buyout of Gowalla by Facebook emerged. In a subsequent blog post on the official Gowalla blog, the Co-Founder of the company confirmed the news to the world. The blog post mentioned how the deal happened. A few months ago, both the founders of Gowalla had visited Facebook’s F8 conference. The duo where amazed at the developments happening at Facebook – especially around its new Timeline feature. Facebook seemed to have brief talks with the team and after a discussion; Facebook seemed to have made up its mind to acquire Gowalla.
While many thought that Gowalla would continue to be around in its standalone form, the company has confirmed that the service would be retiring very soon (as early as next month). Since Facebook has acquired just the form and not the user data that has been uploaded to its server, Gowalla has confirmed that they would be allowing users to download all data posted on to the website to a local hard drive. As of now, they are working on solutions that would allow users to do this.
The entire team of Gowalla would be moving from its current offices in Austin, Texas to the more glamorous Facebook campus in Palo Alto, California.
If you happen to be one of those who used to love using this Foursquare alternative, what do you think about this latest development? Do you think Foursquare needs to be worried if Facebook decides to come up with an integrated FourSquare challenger now that they have the expertise of Gowalla at their disposal?
