Facebook picks up team behind location-sharing service Gowalla

The team behind Gowalla is going to Facebook.

That's the upshot of a blog post from one of the company's founders, Josh Williams.

Like the more-popular Foursquare, Gowalla is a mobile application that lets people share where they are and what they are doing with friends by "checking in."

Facebook confirmed that it's hiring Gowalla co-founders Williams and Scott Raymond, along with "several other members" of the Gowalla team. They'll move to Facebook in January, joining its engineering and design teams. Facebook did not identify which product or products the Gowalla group would work on.

The move gives Facebook an injection of top engineers as it competes for talent with other tech giants such as Google and Apple and startups such as Square. Facebook said last week it was opening an engineering office in New York to attract engineers. And Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said Facebook plans to hire thousands of employees in the next year.

Williams said the talks with Facebook began after the F8 conference in September. For those keeping track, that was one year after Foursquare decided not to sell out to Facebook, opting instead to stay independent -- and pursue a truckload of cash from venture capitalists.

A CNN report Friday prompted a weekend of fevered speculation over whether Facebook was buying Gowalla.

But in moving to Palo Alto from Austin, Texas, the Gowalla team won't be packing up the Gowalla service or its technology. Instead, the service will be wound down early next year, Williams said in his post.

"We're sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time," a Facebook spokesman said in an e-mailed statement.

Gowalla was one of the pioneers in the location-based sharing space. Both Gowalla and Foursquare launched in the same week of 2009. Kara Swisher dubbed the company "Not Foursquare." As she rightly points out, the company had changed tactics several times and was for sale for some time.

Clearly it's not the way Williams and his team had hoped things would turn out. But working for Facebook, which is on the verge of a $100-billion initial public offering, is surely a nice consolation prize.

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About 1 in 5 smart-phone owners use check-in apps; Facebook top check-in service, study finds

About one in five smart-phone owners use check-in services such as Foursquare, Gowalla or Facebook Places, according to the research firm ComScore.

In a study on the location-based social networking apps, ComScore found that about 16.7 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. used the check-in services on their phones in March 2011, representing about 17.6% of total smart-phone users.

ComScore also found that users of check-in services also displayed a "high propensity for mobile media usage," pulling up retail websites and shopping guides on their smart phones and tablet computers.

"Although still in their relative infancy, location-based mobile check-in services are seeing rather impressive adoption among smart-phone users," said Mark Donovan, ComScore's senior vice president of mobile. "The ability to interact with consumers on this micro-local level through special offers, deals and other incentives provides brands with the real-time opportunity to engage consumers through their mobile device."

Facebook Places is the most popular check-in service, said Sarah Radwanick, a ComScore spokeswoman.

"Facebook is the most popular social network and with people already using it for other things, it's really easy for them to check-in at a location," Radwanick said.

Of those who ComScore found to be using check-in services, 60% were between the ages of 18 and 34.

Almost half, 46.4% of check-in users had full-time jobs, which is slightly less than the percentage of total smart-phone users in the U.S. who are also employed full time -- 53.3%, ComScore said.

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Image: A screenshot of the Gowalla iPad app. Credit: Gowalla