Following Instagram Buy, Facebook Acquires Ambient Location-Based App Glancee

Following its much publicized acquisition of hip photo-sharing app Instagram, Facebook has purchased yet another startup in the form of location-based service Glancee. Visit the official Web site of Glancee and you will be greeted with the above pictorial message. On the site, beneath the message is the following statement by the Glancee team.

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.

Touted as "serendipity supercharged," Glancee uses used ambient location data to help create connections among users with mutual friends and similar interests, based mainly on their Facebook profiles. If you are a Glancee user, you can download your data by following this link. The existence of this link should be proof enough that Glancee is well on its way to being defunct. In fact, it has already been pulled out of the App Store. With the discontinuation of Glancee itself, it's likely that the team behind the app will be developing other location-based services for Facebook. What do you think is next on Mark Zuckerberg's startup shopping list?

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