Facebook buys location-based service, Glancee

Facebook's gone shopping again. While this time it's not with a $1 billion cheque, it's still a service that Facebook could use to make its mobile presence stronger. The service they acquired is called Glancee and it is an ambient location application. The app helps you discover people that are in your proximity and also friends and the things that you might have in common with them. Glancee used to use Facebook to find common friends and also Wikipedia to match users based on interest. Now, according to TechCrunch, Facebook has shut down Glancee's ambient location app and the three employees who work at Glancee have now joined Facebook. The technology that Glancee uses, of course, now belongs to Facebook. The social networking giant released a statement saying, "We are thrilled to confirm that Facebook has acquired Glancee. The acquisition closed today. We can’t wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto and Gabriel to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends.”

Glancee put a message up on their homepage that mentions the acquisition. They said, "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’ve had such a blast connecting people through Glancee, and we truly thank our users for being a part of the Glancee community."

Glancee had a competitor in its ambient location service, called Highlight and industry guesses state that Facebook couldn't buy Highlight, so they went for the next best thing. Highlight has 9,000 daily active users, while Glancee has 3,000 daily active users. In the meanwhile, Facebook has an IPO coming up on the 18th of May and they want to price their shares from $28 (approx 1,428) to $35 (approx 1,785) each. It will be interesting to see if Facebook will use Glancee's services or if they just want to prevent another startup from getting too big.