Facebook Aquires Nextstop – A Travel Recommendation Site

Social networking giant, Facebook recently acquired social travel recommendation site Nextstop, according to a blog post on the startup's site. The startup, which originally launched early 2009 mixes social recommendations with search and adds a reputation system and elements of gameplay. The company was founded by two ex-Googlers, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, who helpd launch Google Calendar (Sjogreen) and Google Groups and Picasa. The idea of the site came about with the frustration the two had of finding things to do in unfamiliar places.

According to the post, the startup's employees are joining the social network and Facebook is acquiring most of the assets of Nextstop. The site is planned to shut down on September 1 but the startup is workign on several ways for current users to export their contributions to Picasa, Google maps, or other sites. The company is also aiming to release a database of Nextstop recommendations and content under a Creative Commons license. The site currently includes information on nearly 100,000 recommendations for places around the world. The main differentiation between Nextstop and its competitors was the focus the company had on making recommendations social. The site did more than just use Facebook Connect, it also used social elements to filter recommendations.

So what does this mean for Facebook? It could possibly mean that it is going further deep into socializing travel. This also appears to be a talent acquisition as the founders are experienced in social products at Google. Check out an excerpt of the text from the original Nextstop blog post below for some more information:

When we started nextstop just over two years ago, our goal was to make it dramatically easier to discover great things to do anywhere in the world. During that time, we’ve been amazed and delighted by your enthusiasm for this project, and it’s strengthened our conviction that information from friends and passionate locals is a much better way to discover the world around you.

It’s with that goal in mind that we have some big news to share today: nextstop has been acquired by Facebook. What this means is that we’ll be joining Facebook and that Facebook has bought most of our assets.

This creates a number of big changes for the nextstop product and our community, but we believe it’s an opportunity for some of the ideas behind nextstop to reach Facebook’s audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own.