Facebook 'acq-hires' Gowalla brains, shuts service down Facebook has confirmed that it is bringing the team behind Gowalla into the social network’s fold. Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond and some of the members of the Gowalla team will move from Austin, Texas HQ to Facebook’s Valley digs to join its design and engineering teams. Williams said that Facebook …
We live in dangerous times. No interesting new service is safe. If you get an account and want to try something out, expect it to be gobbled up and shut down, just as you started to enjoy using it.
How long before Diaspora is lost? Zuckerberg already contributed to the development costs!
Thank god Twitter remains untouched so far. I've emptied my facebook account manually (a laboriuos process and no mistake) and left it dormant as a contact point. I just can't stop second-guessing what my information may or may not be worth as I type it, by which point the motivation to post anything at all leaks away, and I don't.
This, combined with the seemingly new threat of Facebook assimilating minds which would potentially come up with the competition in order to shut down their services and pull in their staff, means the whole social media scene is going to start looking very bland indeed shortly.
And yeah, I know - this is how Microsoft have done business for years. But they were just making OSs and applications. This is control over the self-published life-contents of entire populations.
And don't expect Facebook's recent public self-flagellation to carry any weight with me either... don't believe a word of it. Zuckerberg's original assessment of those who use his service will still be at the back of his mind: if he thought that way when he had a few thousand people's information, how will the incredible scaled-anonymity of having access to data from over half a billion people lessen that?
It's pure, corporate evil. The kind that has no moral compass, no idea of what damage can be caused in the pursuit of profit. And everybody will continue to use it like good little drones.
God help us all.
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Never used Gowalla (and couldn't give a toss about it either, another Nathan Barleyesque location-based social network apparently).
That said, I can recognise a vapid corporate attempt at weaselling over the fact they're killing the service and doing nothing with it via the magic of would-be touchy-feely-PR-speak bullshit.
"We’re sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time"
Yeah, right. There's always something particularly nauseating about the insincere use of "inspiration" in such contexts.
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