Los Angeles — The pre-IPO spending spree continues for Facebook with it second biggest acquisition of 2012. Barely a month after scooping up mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for approximately $1 billion, the social media humongous has further beefed up its mobile portfolio by acquiring Glancee, a location-based, “social discovery” app designed to connect you with friends in the real world.
Last week, Facebook confirmed that it has acquired up-and-coming location-sharing app Glancee, a mobile app that utilizes your location and Facebook login to connect you with like-minded individuals who happen to be near you in real life is the biggest rival for Highlight.Terms of the deal were not revealed but it looks like Glancee will be shutting down and some or all of the team will be joining Facebook–and they will be working on location-related features for the social media giant. Facebook confirmed the deal in a written statement:
“We are thrilled to confirm that Facebook has acquired Glancee. The acquisition closed today. We cannot wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto, and Gabriel (Chief Executive Officer Andrea Vaccari, Chief Operating Officer Alberto Tretti, and Chief Technology Officer Gabriel Grise) to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends.”
Banner on Glancee’s site…
Moving forward, Glancee the iOS and Android application, empowers users to discover new friends based on their current locations. We say this in past tense, for the app can no longer be found on either the Android Market or Apple’s App Store.
As soon as the app is activated, you could use Glancee to produce a list of nearby Glancee users and find out what friends or interests you both have in common. You could then add the to-be-pal as a “Favorite” user–which sounds kind of like friendly stalking, but not really–or strike up an online conversation to determine whether you could eventually seal the friendship deal in real life.
Well, it is not hard to distinguish why Facebook is scooping up mobile apps with huge potential; of late, the company has been working on getting their own mobile app more user friendly with several updates recently, and the acquisition of companies like Instagram–which was already well-known at the time of the purchase and had just been made available to Android users, which meant a huge surge in downloads.
On the other hand, Glancee boasts some cool elements, and the promise of being able to connect your virtual Facebook life with your physical one using the Glancee app is certainly compelling. Some of the benefits of Glancee — at least, in comparison to its larger competitor Highlight, which does not appear to have been for sale–include the fact that the app’s cross-platform (Highlight is currently iOS exclusive). Additionally, Glancee does not display the precise location of nearby users on a giant map–a pro for Highlight if you are actually looking for people to chat with in a real-world environment, but a con for everyone else who does not want to feel as if they are being haunted through a social application.
A notice on Glancee’s Web site today reads:
“We started Glancee in 2010 with the goal of bringing together the best of your physical and digital worlds. We wanted to make it easy to discover the hidden connections around you, and to meet interesting people. Since then Glancee has connected thousands of people, empowering serendipity and pioneering social discovery.”
“We are therefore very excited to announce that Facebook has acquired Glancee and that we have joined the team in Menlo Park to build great products for over 900 million Facebook users. We have had such a blast connecting people through Glancee, and we truly thank our users for being a part of the Glancee community.”
Nevertheless, with Glancee under its backyard, it means they are boosting their own mobile capabilities. That, in turn, will only help them in their move to go public. Facebook is expected to hit the stock market on May 18, according to The Guardian.