Facebook has acquired Nextstop, a service that allows users to browse and create their own local guides and recommendations.
In an announcement on its website, Nextstop stated that it will shut down on September 1, but will be releasing the Nextstop database under a Creative Commons license so that the guides survive. Nextstop launched just a year ago.
The service focuses on creating beautiful and dead-simple guides of local destinations and hotspots. It provides a range of community features such as badges and guide recommendations. Back when it launched, we said that we were "thoroughly impressed with our first run of Nextstop."
However, the site faced stiff competition from the likes of Yelp and Where I've Been, so latching onto Facebook's rapid growth was probably appealing to the startup. Facebook is likely interested in the company's talent, perhaps even more than the technology: Nextstop was co-founded by Carl Sjogreen, Adrian Graham and Charles Lin. Sjogreen and Graham are former Googlers. The former worked on Google Calendar and the latter on Picasa.
It also doesn't surprise us that Facebook is shutting down Nextstop. The personnel and to a lesser extent the technology are what make this acquisition valuable, not the actual user-generated guides.