Facebook will acquire the majority of NextStop's

 

Social networking behemoth Facebook has purchased user generated travel guide provider NextStop for an undisclosed fee.

The San Francisco-based firm was started two years ago and allows users to share their advice on where to visit with fellow travellers.

While Facebook will acquire the majority of NextStop's assets, the company appears to be keen to incorporate talent - including two former Google product managers - from the company into its own offering.

Facebook confirmed the deal, describing it in an e-mail as "a small talent acquisition" driven largely by Facebook's admiration of NextStop's engineering efforts.This is a tactic Facebook has previously employed.

Last April the giant purchased photo-sharing service Divvyshot and closed it down six weeks later, while the 2007 acquisition of Parakey brought the former creators of the Firefox browser into the fold.The deal follows last week's acquisition of ITA Software by Google.

NextStop Stopped

Following the deal NextStop will cease to exist on September 1st. Users have until this deadline to migrate their files from the site.

"This creates a number of big changes for the NextStop product and our community, but we believe it's an opportunity for some of the ideas behind NextStop to reach Facebook's audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own," NextStop said in a statement.

Before the deadline NextStop outlined plans to release its database of places and recommendations under a Creative Commons license in a format designed for easy importing into other tools.

"Our aim is make it possible for other products — whether they already exist or are yet to be created — to harness the collective knowledge of the NextStop community, which includes information on nearly 100,000 recommendations for places around the world."