Facebook Acquires Private Content-Sharing Startup Sharegrove: “
Facebook added another acquisition to its belt today: Sharegrove, a small service that provides private online spaces where family and close friends can share content in real-time.
Sharegrove uses Facebook Connect to knit together a cross between e-mail, group chat and Facebook wall-type postings.
The purpose of the buyout is to bring the engineering talent behind Sharegrove to the Facebook team. We suspect it also may have everything to do with the backlash the company is experiencing around privacy issues, considering that Sharegrove’s product is focused on content sharing in much smaller and more intimate circles, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own admission that Facebook has been making blunders in that regard. It makes sense for the company to pull in some fresh expertise from a startup infused with ideas about how to handle user-generated content within tighter social graphs.
Sharegrove itself will be no more as of June 1, less than a week away. New user registrations have already been disabled, and as of the first of the month the entire service will be shut down and all user data deleted ‘for security purposes.’ It’s cold comfort to the userbase of Sharegrove, but could be promising news for Facebook denizens still seething about the company’s rather forceful overtures toward killing privacy.
What do you think Facebook’s most recent acquisition could mean for the social network’s future strategy?
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Yuri_Arcurs
[via VentureBeat]
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Tags: acquisitions, business, facebook, privacy, sharegrove
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