Los Angeles — Facebook, the globes’ largest social networking leader, fresh from its preferential privacy revamp, is continuing its business as usual opened up its pockets this week in order to stack up its arsenal with a company called ShareGrove, a small US startup that provides a modern day chat facility, enabling users to create private group conversations in real-time with their Facebook contacts.
ShareGrove disclosed the deal on its Facebook page, appropriately enough, and notes that it is shutting down operations on June 1st. This enables users who have data stored in its system time to make a backup–after June 1, all user data will be deleted, which is a nice privacy step that Facebook should take note of.
Thanks to Facebook Connect, Sharegrove’s service empowers users to request their friends to join a confidential conversation where they can share content such as links, photos, videos and text at once with all participants in real-time.
Interestingly, the service’s incorporation with Facebook Connect lets users find friends to add to their conversations easily. Commentators are suggesting Facebook is keen to develop a service similar to Sharegrove’s for its chat function, enabling users to easily communicate and share links privately.
ShareGrove said in a statement:
“We are happy to announce that we have reached an agreement for Facebook to acquire our assets, and that we are joining the Facebook engineering team! We have always thought that Facebook had a great product, and through this acquisition process, we have found out that there is a great team behind it. Now we are excited to bring some of that Sharegroviness that you know and love to Facebook.
This means that we are winding down Sharegrove operations starting today, and new user registration is now disabled. We will leave the service running until June 1st, at which point we will shut it down completely. If you have data stored on Sharegrove that you would like to retrieve in bulk, we will do our best to accommodate your request. Please email us at info@sharegrove.com. Otherwise, for security purposes, we will delete all of our users’ personal information, as well as their posts.
We want to thank each one of you for using our service. It has been a tremendous experience for us, and we are excited to bring our knowledge and passion to Facebook.
Remember that Facebook has a burgeoning audience of more 500 million members. Given some coding love, Facebook Chat could speedily rival Yahoo’s Messenger (over 248 million Yahoo users in total in 2008), AOL (53 million active users in September 2006) or MSN (330 million active users, as of June 2009), because who would want to click into another window to chat to someone or a group, and share links and so on, when you’re probably already logged in to Facebook?
Following concerns over privacy at Facebook, the social network could also be looking to bring in Sharegrove’s expertise in handling user-generated data in smaller social circles. No details on how exactly ShareGrove will be folded into Facebook, although one obvious possibility is that its concept could be added to Facebook’s chat service.