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Facebook acquires location-based social discovery startup Glancee

Facebook has acquired location-based social discovery startup Glancee for an undisclosed sum. The purchase closely follows two other acquisitions just last month: Tagtile and Instagram.
Written by Emil Protalinski, Contributor

Facebook has acquired Glancee, a San Francisco-based startup that developed a location-based social discovery app. Essentially, the app alerted users when people with similar interests were nearby. I say this in the past tense because Glancee has already been removed from the Apple App Store. If you are a Glancee user, you can download your data from here: api.glancee.com/messages.

Glancee has three employees and all three co-founders are moving to work for the social networking giant. Additional details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but this appears to be a mainly talent acquisition, although Facebook is taking over the startup's technologies.

"We are thrilled to confirm that Facebook has acquired Glancee," a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement. "We can't wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto and Gabriel to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends."

Here's the full announcement from Glancee:

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.

Glancee's biggest competitor is Highlight, which is significantly more popular. For whatever reason, Facebook chose to buy the underdog, either because it couldn't buy Highlight, or because it decided that wasn't necessary for its purposes.

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