Facebook Buys Travel Recommendations Startup NextStop
Posted by on July 19th, 2010 View Comments
Posted in Social Media |
Facebook has once again expanded its ever-growing web empire with its latest acquisition: NextStop. Literally, Facebook made its next stop of mergers at a travel recommendations startup company. The social media giant bought the San Francisco-based business just after another Internet powerhouse, Google, acquired travel firm ITA Software. It sounds like the battle for travel industry supremacy on the web has begun.
NextStop was founded by Adrian Graham and Carl Sjogreen. They were former Google managers who have a lot of relevant experience with online apps. They created NextStop as a HTML5 web site that utilizes Creative Commons media to gather information about different locations around the world.
In the two years of its operations, NextStop has focused on its mission to provide helpful user-generated travel and activity guides to its customers. Their goal was to give recommendations to people about the best destinations they could find in the world. With that goal in mind, the NextStop team still believes that they can accomplish this project at much bigger scale and reach more potential customers – with Facebook. This year will be different though, as NextStop’s staff will join Facebook’s development team and its site will be shut down on September 1st because of Facebook’s acquisition.
In an official statement, NextStop said that it was a difficult decision for them:
“We felt like NextStop had a great future and recently released some major updates in response to user feedback over the past few months. In the end, however, we decided that pursuing our mission to help people discover the world around them was something that could be done with greater impact and scale as a part of Facebook.”
Facebook acquired most of NextStop’s assets after they were impressed by the travel firm’s engineering efforts. Facebook did not announce what the company plans to do with what they have acquired from NextStop. With the emergence of location-based services, Facebook has been pushing aggressively to join the playing field. Mark Zuckerberg and co. have been wanting to develop apps that could provide similar services that help people discover places and events depending on their location at any particular time.
NextStop announced on its web site that the company will not share any information regarding NextStop users who have contributed to them with Facebook. Instead, they will be releasing a database for public use:
“In the next few weeks we will be releasing the nextstop database of places and recommendations under a Creative Commons license in a format suitable for easy importing. 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.”
Facebook has not yet disclosed the terms of deal nor the amount to which they paid NextStop.
