Facebook has acquired Sharegrove, a social site that already utilizes Facebook Connect to let Facebook users have private conversations and share photos, videos, and links with groups of their Facebook friends at the same time.
One can only speculate that Facebook’s plan with this is to simply roll this kind of functionality into Facebook itself. Sharegrove will not remain a standalone product like Friendfeed did after Facebook acquired it. Sharegrove has already disabled registration.
Sharegrove has posted the following announcement on its site:
We’re happy to announce that we’ve reached an agreement for Facebook to acquire our assets, and that we’re joining the Facebook engineering team! We’ve always thought that Facebook had a great product, and through this acquisition process, we’ve found out that there’s a great team behind it. Now we’re excited to bring some of that Sharegroviness that you know and love to Facebook.
This means that we’re winding down Sharegrove operations starting today, and new user registration is now disabled. We’ll leave the service running until June 1st, at which point we’ll shut it down completely. If you have data stored on Sharegrove that you’d like to retrieve in bulk, we will do our best to accommodate your request. Please email us at [email protected]. Otherwise, for security purposes, we’ll delete all of our users’ personal information, as well as their posts.
We want to thank each one of you for using our service. It’s been a tremendous experience for us, and we’re excited to bring our knowledge and passion to Facebook.
All our best,
The Sharegrove team
Sharegrove has already been compared to Friendfeed, but in some ways, it’s almost got a Google Wave-ish feel to it (not that it has all of the functionality or complexity that comes along with that).
On a separate note, Facebook has a big privacy meeting underway today, and simpler privacy settings are expected to be revealed.