Today Viadeo, a professional networking social network similar to LinkedIn, announced it has acquired Pealk, the self-styled “#1 Hunting App” for LinkedIn.

Pealk was an app designed for HR and managers to cull LinkedIn profiles for potential recruits. It allowed users to sort and track recruits, similar to LinkedIn’s own paid-for headhunting service. Viadeo claims 50 million worldwide users for its service.

The transaction wouldn’t be particularly worth mentioning if Pealk hadn’t had its LinkedIn API access yanked in the summer of 2012. LinkedIn claimed at the time that Pealk was abusing its API access and violating LinkedIn’s API Terms of Use.

As the entire Pealk project had been built on LinkedIn, the company promptly discontinued its app after its API access was revoked. For six months no more word was heard of Pealk, and LinkedIn never released details on why it booted Pealk. Though today’s announcement did not include the amount of the purchase price, it is almost certainly less than Pealk’s founders might have hoped for. However, any sale of the languishing company must be better than none at all.

“We’re very proud and pleased with this buyout, which we consider to be the happy ending to an exciting adventure,” said Boris Golden, Pealk CEO, in a press statement. “It’s also the beginning of a new adventure for us, since there are plenty of applications just waiting to be invented that will give professionals more ways to unlock Viadeo’s full potential!”