Facebook buys Glancee, another app to beef up its mobile side

We’re guessing the pricetag on this deal was slightly less than the $1 billion it paid for Instagram, but Facebook has indeed bought up Italian startup Glancee.

Glancee is an iPhone and Android app that “helps you discover and connect with new interesting people around you.” The concept may sound like the sea of sameness that mobile/social apps are these days, but the app itself was quite pretty, as you can see below.

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Unfortunately for the app’s users, this was a talent grab. It looks like Facebook is shutting Glancee down; users are being offered the chance to download their data, and the app has been yanked from the App Store and Google Play’s Android apps section.

The app hadn’t seen too much traction but had garnered some favorable mentions from Silicon Valley early adopter types such as Robert Scoble.

On its website, the Glancee team writes:

We started Glancee in 2010 with the goal of bringing together the best of your physical and digital worlds. We wanted to make it easy to discover the hidden connections around you, and to meet interesting people. Since then Glancee has connected thousands of people, empowering serendipity and pioneering social discovery.

We are therefore very excited to announce that Facebook has acquired Glancee and that we have joined the team in Menlo Park to build great products for over 900 million Facebook users. We’ve had such a blast connecting people through Glancee, and we truly thank our users for being a part of the Glancee community.

“We can’t wait for co-founders Andrea, Alberto, and Gabriel to join the Facebook team to work on products that help people discover new places and share them with friends,” said Facebook reps in a statement.