When in December last year Facebook acquired location sharing service Gowalla for an undisclosed sum, speculations were ripe that Facebook was planning to improve its Timeline feature by buying this company, and how right they were. Today in a blog post by the company it was revealed that Gowalla’s former CEO Josh Williams along with his team have been working on developing an API that lets developers integrate everything from status updates to photos, from friend tagging to checkins.
Quoting from the blog post by Alex Wyler – “Starting today, location and friends can be added as properties to any photo, link, or status written from an app. This is similar to the functionality a user has when they add a photo or updates their status.”
It seems Facebook might finally be ready to take their Timeline to the success level that they presumed it would reach when it was first announced a few months ago. Being able to checkin and eat at your favorite restaurant, and being able to add those who are with you, taking snapshots of the little gathering and posting it on Facebook, all done through the same platform and without any hassles, truly amounts to great user involvement.
Gowalla’s former compatriots Foursquare have been making a lot of progress and already had 5 times Gowalla’s user base when Facebook acquired Gowalla, but the question now stands, has the Facebook team acquired the right company to boost its Timeline feature? We will soon find out. You may probably find the answer here.
