Facebook has acquired a travel recommendation start-up called NextStop–but as has been the pattern with the massive social network’s history of small purchases, it will be shutting the NextStop product down. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We’ll be joining Facebook and…Facebook has bought most of our assets,” a message on NextStop’s home page read, adding that NextStop will be shutting down on September 1 and that current members are being offered a number of tools for exporting their travel guides. “In the next few weeks we will be releasing the NextStop database of places and recommendations under a Creative Commons license in a format suitable for easy importing. Our aim is make it possible for other products–whether they already exist or are yet to be created–to harness the collective knowledge of the NextStop community, which includes information on nearly 100,000 recommendations for places around the world.”


It’s unclear whether any of the NextStop assets will be worked into Facebook. Representatives from Facebook weren’t immediately available for comment about the NextStop team’s transition into the company.

When Facebook buys companies, for the most part, it’s for the engineering talent: the company seems to prefer building products in-house or letting third parties contribute to the Facebook experience by accessing its application programming interface. Most recently, Facebook acquired a photo-sharing service called Divvyshot in April and shut it down six weeks later; a 2007 acquisition, Parakey, brought the former creators of the Firefox browser to Facebook’s employee ranks.

The acquisition of FriendFeed from last summer was a significantly bigger one, and the FriendFeed product remains intact. Its former CEO, Bret Taylor, is now Facebook’s chief technology officer.

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This is the first of what seems like a series of new features for its popular photo product.

The tests, which some users will see starting today [Friday], focus on decreasing the tediousness of “tagging” friends in Facebook photos. In the current Photos feature, users upload photos, click on each face in a photo, tag that photo with the friend pictured therein and continue the process until the album is tagged.

If you’ve got a large album or a lot of friends in a single photo, this process is inefficient and tedious. To solve this problem, Facebook has implemented face detection technology that will automatically find faces in photos and select them, eliminating one of the most tedious steps in tagging Facebook friends in photos. Your friends are already selected by the software — all you have to do is answer the Facebook prompt, “Whose face is this?”

The technology is the same as the facial detection technology most digital cameras use today. While the tech itself may not be all that new, it is a clever and very welcomed addition to the Facebook Photos feature set.

The company also promises that face detection is merely the first of many improvements that they’re trying out. It’s also interesting that the post was written by Sam Odio, one of the co-founders of Divvyshot, which Facebook acquired back in April in order to improve the Photos product.

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