Within days of announcing Facebook Places, its new geolocation application that lets users to tell their contacts about where they are, Facebook, the most popular social networking site has acquired Hot Potato. Hot Potato is a check-in service “that lets people use smartphones to let friends know what they are up to at any given moment.”
“We’re excited to confirm that we recently acquired Hot Potato, a service that helps people socialize around live events and share what they’re doing with friends,” said Facebook.
Without revealing the value of the transaction, start-up said it will cancel its operations and will no longer register new users within a month to become a division within the social network.
Hot Potato was launched eight months ago. The site is a social networking service that lets users to “register” to allow their friends to know what they watch, listen, where they are, etc. Hot Potato right now has eight employees, majority of them will move to Palo Alto in the near future.
Facebook has not commented on the deal, but it is speculated that the purchase is part of the company’s strategy for intellectual property and absorb the development team of Hot Potato.