Facebook acquires mobile-bookmarking service Spool
The social-networking giant is paying for the company's five employees, not its technology.
Facebook has acquired Spool, a San Francisco-based startup that developed a mobile-bookmarking service. The small firm was all about mobile content consumption, an area Facebook wants to significantly improve in.
The service has already been shut down. It never even made it out of beta. Users were sent an e-mail with all their bookmarks attached in a file called "bookmarks.html."
Spool has recommended its users move their bookmarks to one of its competitors: Pocket or Delicious. If you're a Spool user, you'll want to read this: Instructions for importing your bookmarks into another service.
Spool has five employees and all of them are moving to work for the social-networking giant. Additional details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but this appears to be mainly a talent acquisition; Facebook will not be getting the technology behind the service, or its user data.
Here's the full announcement from Spool:
We started Spool to make content easy to consume on a mobile device. To accomplish this, we built some very sophisticated technology and developed a deep expertise in mobile software development. We firmly believe that solving these problems will be increasingly important as the world accesses the Internet primarily through mobile devices.
We are proud to announce that today we will be pursuing our vision as a part of Facebook. If you were a Spool user, please read the instructions on retaining your bookmarks.
We are extremely excited to accelerate our vision and help Facebook's users connect and share with the people in their lives. We wouldn't be in a position to have this sort of impact without our supporters and the Spool community. Please accept a heartfelt thank you for supporting us and for affording us this opportunity.
Sincerely,
The Spool team
"The Spool team has deep expertise in mobile software development and a passion for making content easy to consume," a Facebook representative said in a statement. "We're excited for the team to join and accelerate their vision at Facebook."