Visitors to Gowalla.com over the weekend have been greeted with the following note: "Thank you for going out with Gowalla. It was a pleasure to journey with you around the world. Download your check-ins, photos and lists here soon."
The mobile phone app, which reportedly had around 600,000 users 12 months ago, allowed people to share the details of their location by checking-in to different venues. People could score points by checking-in multiple times to the same place and create a visual picture of their day using the service.
Last December Facebook announced that it was hiring Gowalla's founders and some of its staff to help build up its location offering.
The timing of the closure of the location-based social network is apt, as it is exactly three years since its launch at the South By Southwest conference, which is ending tomorrow.
However, it happened to go live in 2009 on the same day as rival service Foursquare, which has since enjoyed a greater amount of success and popularity.
Consequently Gowalla relaunched and refocused the service several times in a bid to differentiate itself from its major rival. But it still did not manage to gain the global usage that Foursquare has.
At the time of the deal last Decebmr, a Facebook spokesman said: "We're excited to confirm that Gowalla co-founders Josh Williams and Scott Raymond, along with other members of the Gowalla team, are moving to Facebook in January to join our design and engineering teams.
"In talking with the Gowalla team, we realized that we share many of the same goals: building great products that reach millions of people, making a big impact quickly, and creating new ways for people to connect and share what’s going on in their lives.
"While Facebook isn’t acquiring the Gowalla service or technology, we’re sure that the inspiration behind Gowalla will make its way into Facebook over time.”
There had been no explicit mention by Facebook would shut down Gowalla, but the closure had been expected.
In 2010 Facebook added a location tool allowing people to check-in to places with their friends, via the mobile app.
And last year it launched ‘check-in Deals’ in the UK with some major partners, such as Starbucks - which allow Facebook users to get access to discounts and offers in shops or restaurants they ‘check into’. However, the scheme remains very US-centric and does not offer many local deals from non-chain shops.
Facebook’s location offering has evolved over the last 12 months, as people are still getting used to ‘checking-in’ to their destination. In 2011, the social network scrapped its Groupon-style daily ‘Deals’ service in the US after just four months.
The closure of the service, which had yet to launch outside of the US, did not affect check-in Deals.
The news came just days after Facebook scrapped Places – its separate mobile-only check-in feature on the site, instead opting to roll the location-sharing functionality directly into the status update bar.
Facebook has refused to share any statistics on how large the uptake of the check-in deals has been.
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