Facebook Acquires Local Travel Recommendation Service Nextstop

Facebook has acquired local travel recommendation service, Nextstop. Nextstop is a service where users can create their own local travel guides or browse through other user’s guides and recommend it to other users.

On their blog post, Nextstop has confirmed the acquisition and said that the service will shut down from September 1st while the existing guides will be released under Creative Common License where users can upload them to Picassa, Google Maps and other sites. Currently the site has over 100,000 recommendations on various places in the world.

Here is an excerpt from Nextstop blog post.

When we started nextstop just over two years ago, our goal was to make it dramatically easier to discover great things to do anywhere in the world. During that time, we’ve been amazed and delighted by your enthusiasm for this project, and it’s strengthened our conviction that information from friends and passionate locals is a much better way to discover the world around you.

It’s with that goal in mind that we have some big news to share today: nextstop has been acquired by Facebook. What this means is that we’ll be joining Facebook and that Facebook has bought most of our assets.

This creates a number of big changes for the nextstop product and our community, but we believe it’s an opportunity for some of the ideas behind nextstop to reach Facebook’s audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own.

Nextstop was founded by ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham in early 2009. At Google they worked on the development of Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups, and Picasa. With this acquisition, all the current employees will be inducted into Facebook, while Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham will work as product managers under Facebook’s product director Blake Ross.

Nexstop faced stiff competition from similar sites like Yelp and Where I’ve Been, but what made the service standout from them was making recommendations social through Facebook Connect where users can even filter recommendations. Facebook will hugely benefit from this acquisition as both the founders of Nextstop have worked in Google’s social products and it looks like Facebook will soon come out with some location based service by using Nextstop’s technology.