Facebook confirms that it has purchased Divvyshot, which lets groups of people upload photos to the Web, share and edit them. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the social networking site says Divvyshot's three engineers will work to improve photo sharing in the company's Facebook Photos service. Selling out to large companies for scale is a common move in Silicon Valley, where startups impress corporate development teams at larger companies before getting snapped up.
Facebook confirmed April 5 that it has purchased
Divvyshot, which lets groups
of people upload photos to the Web, share them and edit them, for an
undisclosed sum.
Divvyshot's technology groups its 40,000 users' photos into collections
called "events," allowing multiple people to contribute to one so
that users don't have to publish pictures as separate albums. Pictures uploaded
by friends automatically appear in the events that have been created or joined.
Facebook will apply Divvyshot's approach to online photo sharing to its
Facebook Photos service, which has gotten a speed increase and a refresh as
part of the company's
homepage redesign.
Facebook confirmed the buy, which came a month after Google
acquired Web photo editing service Picnik, but was vague about details.
"We recently completed a small talent acquisition involving the team at
Divvyshot," a Facebook spokesperson told eWEEK. "We've admired the
engineering team's efforts for some time now and this is part of our ongoing
effort to add strong talent to help drive the company forward in its efforts to
be the central way for people to connect and share information."
Divvyshot founder Sam Odio
announced the Facebook deal on his company's blog April 2,
noting that he, Designer Michael Yuan and Developer Paul Carduner would be
joining Facebook as engineers to work on Facebook Photos.
He added that Divvyshot would be winding down the Website's operations, thus
underscoring that Facebook's move was about talent rather than propelling the
Divvyshot service.
However, Odio strongly implied that Divvyshot's method would continue to
exist in some fashion, even if the destination, the user experience and some of
the code would be different.
"We know many of our users will have mixed feelings about this
move," Odio said. "While this means Divvyshot as you know it will
cease to exist, it's important to realize that our unique approach to photos
will live on. This is an opportunity to touch hundreds of millions of users
with the best parts of our product. That's something we hope you can get
behind."
Selling out to large companies for scale is a common move in Silicon
Valley, where startups impress corporate development teams at
larger companies before getting snapped up.
Aardvark, for example, was a social search engine before
Google acquired it. Aardvark CEO
Max Ventilla said at the time the deal would help the service reach a scale it
wouldn't be able to reach on its own.
This doesn't always make it painless for users who join these often free Web
services because of word of mouth, only to find the rug pulled out from under
them after they've ceded their data to the startup's cloud. Fortunately, this
isn't entirely the case with Divvyshot.
While no new accounts will be issued and the company's iPhone application
will no longer be available for download, Divvyshot will let users export their
original-resolution photos to ease the transition off
Divvyshot.
Odio said existing users can continue to use Divvyshot to varying degrees
over the next six weeks before all visitors will be redirected to Facebook's
Website.
Read more about this deal on
Techmeme here.
Facebook, which turned six years old in February, is showing signs of being
more acquisitive. The company
picked up FriendFeed in 2009 and
open-sourced its Web server.
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