Facebook Buys User-Generated Destination Guide Nextstop

By Geoff Duncan July 9, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Social networking giant Facebook has bought Nextstop, a guide to interesting things to do, places to go, and stuff to see around the world submitted by its users. But Facebook isn’t just taking over Nextstop and leaving it alone: Facebook is shutting down the existing Nextstop service effective September 1. Existing users have two months to continue with the service and migrate their content out to services like Google Maps, Picasa, or downloadable documents.

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed, and Facebook hasn’t said what it plans to do with the assets its acquired from Nextstop.

“This was a difficult decision for us,” Nextstop wrote in a FAQ explaining the acquisition. “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.”

Nextstop says it has information on more than 100,000 destinations and places around the world; it plans to release the existing database of places and recommendations in the next few weeks under a Creative Commons license, so other services could, in theory, leverage the content.

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