Gowalla has shut down, three months after being bought by Facebook, which will integrate the firm’s staff and technology into its own location-based tools.
The news was announced on the Texas-based firm’s homepage, which read:
“Thank you for going out with Gowalla. It was a pleasure to journey with you around the world. Download your check-ins, photos, and lists here soon.”
The check-in service was a rival to market leader Foursquare. It allowed people to share the details of their location by checking-in to different venues with their smartphones.
Users could score points by checking-in multiple times to the same place and create a visual picture of their day using the service.
It’s mobile phone app reportedly had around 600,000 users 12 months ago.
The firm was acquired by Facebook in December after several months of rumors.
At the time, Gowalla’s co-founder Josh Williams said in a blog post that the service would be “winding down” by January.
The ball first got rolling on the Facebook deal when Williams and fellow co-founder Scott Raymond attended Facebook’s f8 developer conference.
“We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments,” Williams wrote. “A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook.”
Williams, Raymond, and the Gowalla team moved to Facebook in January to join the social network’s design and engineering team.
Facebook’s acquisition of Gowalla did not include user data, so those who did not delete their information don’t need to worry that Facebook has tracked their previous check-ins.
Gowalla was founded in 2009 and raised about $10 million in funding from Greylock Partners and various angel investors.