Facebook to acquire, shut down NextStop site

Facebook has acquired a travel recommendation site called NextStop - but don't expect to see its influences anytime soon. Initial plans call for the NextStop service - which is built on user-generated recommendations - to be shuttered on September 1. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

That shouldn't come as too much of a surprise, seeing how Facebook is known for making acquisitions for engineering talent. And, according to an FAQ on NextStep's site, the decision to join Facebook was not an easy one. From the post:

Why did you agree to this deal with Facebook? This was a difficult decision for us. We felt like nextstop had a great future, and recently released some major updates in response to user feedback over the past few months. In the end, however, we decided that pursuing our mission to help people discover the world around them was something that could be done with greater impact and scale as a part of Facebook.

Why is nextstop closing? Members of the nextstop team are joining Facebook and we hope that some of the central ideas behind nextstop will live on. We’re shutting down the current version of nextstop so we can focus all of our attention on what comes next.

Current members of the service will be able to export their recommendations to outside sites until Sept. 1. After that, the NextStop service - and its data - will pretty much vanish from the Web.