Facebook acquires activity-recommendations startup Nextstop

Facebook is adding another talent acquisition to the mix. It has acquired Nextstop, a San Francisco-based startup for recommending things to do or places to go.

“This was a difficult decision for us,” the company said in a statement. “We felt like NextStop had a great future and recently released some major updates in response to user feedback over the past few months. In the end, however, we decided that pursuing our mission to help people discover the world around them was something that could be done with greater impact and scale as a part of Facebook.”

NextStop has two experienced former Google product managers: Adrian Graham, who managed Picasa, and Carl Sjogreen, who was the founding product manager for Calendar.

The site, which launched a year ago, will shut down in September, and the company is offering export tools for users to take their work and content with them elsewhere. They’re also making the content on the site licensed under Creative Commons, a standard copyright license that allows the public to repurpose it. They’ll even allow commercial use. The company said it’s not sharing information that NextStop users have contributed to the site with Facebook.

Here’s an interview Robert Scoble did with the NextStop team in December, when Nextstop announced its mobile website: