Facebook adds Gowalla developers to its software team

Gowalla's team will move from their Austin, Texas base to Facebook's California headquarters

Facebook has announced it is hiring the co-founders of Gowalla.

The social network is also taking on other developers from the location-based "check-in service". Gowalla will close in 2012 as a consequence.
The news comes days after Facebook announced plans to take on "thousands" of new members of staff.
The company is opening a software engineering centre in New York as part of the strategy - its first away from of the West Coast of the US.
Goodbye Gowalla Despite a report last week by CNN that Facebook had acquired Gowalla for an undisclosed sum, the company said on Monday that it had taken on key members of the businesses's staff but had not bought the organisation outright.
"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," a statement said.
"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."
Texas-based Gowalla is a two-year-old social network based around the idea of allowing users to "check in" to locations and share pictures from their visits.
Members used to receive virtual "items" at certain check-in points. However, the company struggled against a larger competitor, Foursquare.
In September it refocused its efforts on becoming a travel service, offering "social guides" to 60 cities, including London, Paris and Chicago, based on its members' postings.
Timeline A blog post on Gowalla's site said: "Gowalla, as a service, will be winding down at the end of January. We plan to provide an easy way to export your Passport data, your Stamp and Pin data (along with your legacy Item data), and your photos as well. Facebook is not acquiring Gowalla's user data.
"As we move forward, we hope some of the inspiration behind Gowalla - a fun and beautiful way to share your journey on the go - will live on at Facebook."
The original CNN report suggested that the Gowalla team would work on Facebook's Timeline feature.
Timeline turns users' profile pages into digital scrapbooks, making it easier for them to view each others' life histories.
The feature was announced in September, but has yet to be rolled out to many of the site's members.
A spokesman for the firm told the BBC: "It is coming soon."
Facebook already had a location-based service built into its mobile device apps and website, but experts say the network may want to use the developers' experience to create a richer experience.
"Facebook Places seems to work fairly well but they want to make a big play in this area," said Lee Bryant, the European managing director of Dachis Group, a social media consultancy.
"Location-based services are still in their early stages. Gowalla was interesting and slightly more story-based than Foursquare, which Facebook may feel will help it strengthen its Timeline service."

'Best people' The announcement follows Friday's news that the firm plans to open a software engineering centre in New York in early 2012.

Facebook's Sheryl Sandberg said the New York move was a "big step" for the firm

The company already employs an advertising team in the city. However, it is the first time the company has created a software base that is not on the US West Coast.
Facebook's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, announced the New York expansion plan at a press conference attended by the city's Mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and other officials.
"We are trying to grow at a clip that will allow us to get the very best people and integrate them," she said.
"We will be adding thousands of employees in the next year."
The new office will be headed up by Serkan Piantino. He previously led the engineering team behind Facebook's News Feed and helped develop its Timeline feature.
Ms Sandberg did not specify how many of the promised posts would be created in New York.
The moves come ahead of an expected share flotation which analysts say may occur in the first half of next year.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that the firm could raise $10bn through the sale, valuing the company at $100bn.
It quotes sources saying that the initial public offering (IPO) could be completed by June.
Facebook has declined to comment, saying it does not want to add to speculation about the move.

Afghanistan anti-corruption pledge at Bonn summit

Afghanistan has pledged to step up its fight against corruption in return for international support after foreign forces withdraw in 2014.

The promise came at the end of a one-day global conference in the German city of Bonn on Afghanistan's future.
The closing communique said "substantial progress" had been made since the last conference 10 years ago, weeks after the Taliban was toppled.

President Hamid Karzai said Afghanistan's young democracy was making steady progress

However, key player Pakistan has boycotted the talks.
Islamabad has been angered by a Nato attack on a border checkpoint last month that killed 24 of its soldiers.
The final communique said that the international community was ready to stand by Afghanistan in the 10 years after Nato's withdraw - in exchange for good governance.
"The protection of civilians, strengthening the rule of law and the fight against corruption in all its forms remain key priorities," the document read.
"Al-Qaeda has been disrupted and Afghanistan's national security institutions are increasingly able to assume responsibility for a secure and independent Afghanistan," it says.
However, it added that "shortcomings must be addressed" with the goal of creating a peaceful Afghanistan "in which international terrorism does not again find sanctuary and that can assume its rightful place among sovereign nations".
The communique concludes by saying that as foreign forces leave Afghanistan a "decade of transformation" should begin "in which Afghanistan consolidates its sovereignty".
It says the international community's vision for Afghanistan is of a "stable and functioning democracy... conducive to prosperity and peace".
However, correspondents say that behind the optimistic diplomatic language, Afghanistan faces immense challenges - the country will be dependent on billions of dollars of foreign aid for years to come and the absence of Pakistan or representatives from the Taliban has cast a shadow over the summit.
'Not abandoned' Earlier, Afghan President Hamid Karzai hailed the progress his country had made but warned that such gains were by no means secure.
"The people of Afghanistan are looking to this conference for clear affirmation of commitment to make security transition and economic progress irreversible," he said.
About 1,000 delegates from 100 countries and international organisations took part in Monday's gathering.
German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, as host of the conference, said: "We send a clear message to the people of Afghanistan: we will not leave you alone, you will not be abandoned."
US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said she thought it "unfortunate" that Pakistan was not attending.
"We continue to believe that Pakistan has a crucial role to play," she told reporters on the sideline of the meeting.

Mrs Clinton also said that Washington was ending a freeze on hundreds of millions of dollars in development funds to Kabul, following financial reforms there.

Afghan and US officials have repeatedly said that militant groups operating in Afghanistan are based in Pakistan - a charge Pakistan denies.
Nato apologised for the air strike on 26 November but Pakistan insisted it would not attend the talks.
Efforts to hold talks with the Taliban have brought no tangible result so far.
In September militants assassinated former President Burhanuddin Rabbani, who was leading Kabul's effort to broker peace with the insurgents.
Correspondents say a failure to bring the Taliban into the peace process will make it harder to secure the long-term commitments needed to rebuild Afghanistan when Nato operations end in 2014.

Cores reveal when Dead Sea 'died'

Sediments drilled from beneath the Dead Sea reveal that this most remarkable of water bodies all but disappeared 120,000 years ago.

It is a discovery of high concern say scientists because it demonstrates just how dry the Middle East can become during Earth's warm phases.
In such ancient times, few if any humans were living around the Dead Sea.
Today, its feed waters are intercepted by large populations and the lake level is declining rapidly.
"The reason the Dead Sea is going down is because virtually all of the fresh water flowing into it is being taken by the countries around it," said Steve Goldstein, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, US.
"But we now know that in a previous warm period, the water that people are using today and are relying upon stopped flowing all by itself. That has important implications for people today because global climate models are predicting that this region in particular is going to become more arid in the future," he told BBC News.
Prof Goldstein has been presenting the results of the drilling work here at the 2011 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.
The Dead Sea is an extraordinary place. The surface of the inland waterway sits at the lowest land point on the planet, more than 400m below sea level.
Its hyper-salty waters descend in places a further 300m. And below the lake bed is layer upon layer of sediments that record the Dead Sea's history and the climate conditions that have prevailed in the region over hundreds of thousands of years.
A consortium of investigators from Israel, the US, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Norway drilled two cores into the Dead Sea's bed in late 2010. One of them was centred close to the very deepest part of the lake.
At 235m down, the consortium hit a layer of small, rounded pebbles - what the team believes are the deposits of an ancient beach. Given the location of the core, this would suggest the Dead Sea had a complete, or near, dry-down at some point in the past.
Formal dating of the core sediments has not yet been completed, but their pattern leads the team to conclude that the dry-down occurred in the Eemian. This was a stage in Earth history when global temperatures were as warm, if not slightly warmer, than they are today.
The modern day Middle East is preventing water getting into the Dead Sea. The surrounding countries are using it for agriculture. Fertiliser and salt manufacturing are also having an impact. Since 1997, the lake's surface has fallen more than 10m.
"Lake dry-down happened 120,000 years ago without any human intervention," said Prof Emi Ito, from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. "We're helping the lake level go down much sooner; and there are political implications of this lake drying down because water is what causes a lot of wars and I'll just leave it at that."
Prof Zvi Ben-Avraham, of the Minerva Dead Sea Research Centre, Tel Aviv University, added: "The drilling actually... it gives us perspective. Look what went on in 200,000 years; look how the area can be dry and look at the way it can be recovered. We have to get ready for the future."
Past research has shown very clearly how the size of the Dead Sea has fluctuated with the coming and going of ice ages.
During the interglacials (warm periods), the lake shrank; and during glacials (cold phases), the lake grew. And it was in the midst of the last ice age some 25,000 years ago that the Dead Sea reached its maximum extent, with the then water surface standing an astonishing 260m above where it is today.
This giant palaeo-lake, referred to by scientists as Lake Lisan, would have inundated the whole Dead Sea valley, even encompassing the Sea of Galilee to the north.
The consortium has traced these changes in the laminated sediments that line the surrounding cliffs and hills.
It is possible to see exquisite, alternating bands of light (aragonite) and dark (marl) material in the exposed rock.
The light layers are calcium carbonate precipitated out of the water in warm summer months. The dark bands are winter silts washed into the Dead Sea by storms.
But it is also possible to find layers of calcium sulphate (gypsum) and even salt, which relate to extended periods of dry weather when feed waters to the Dead Sea have not kept pace with evaporation.
"All these deposits from the last ice age are sitting at the edge of the lake, and we've been studying them for 20 years," said Prof Goldstein.
"They're beautifully exposed, but… as soon as we have a warm age, like we have today and like we had before the last ice age, the lake is lower and we have no exposures we can use. The only way we can get to those time periods is to have a deep drill core," he told BBC News.