Facebook shuts down Glancee

Rating: As it’s acquired the management & development team

Hot on the heels of its acquisition of the photo sharing site, Instagram, Glancee has admitted to being bought by social networking giant, Facebook. The management and development team have already revealed that it is off to join Facebook at Menlo Park and “to build great products for over 900 million Facebook users.” And the service is no more. The announcement leaked out last week [May 4th 2012] but already the Glancee app has disappeared from the Apple iTunes App Store, for example. If you visit the Glancee web site now, you’ll see a link for former users. This takes you to the relevant page on Facebook from which you can download all of your Glancee messages – if you were a member in the first place, of course. Hopefully, Glancee won’t go the way of the Zyb service.Zyb was an online service that enabled smartphone users to backup and sync their personal contacts data. It was shut down after being acquired by Vodafone.

The intention was to build Zyb technology into Vodafone’s 360 service. Only 360 in now defunct just like Zyb is.

At least Zyb gave its users a cut-off day by which time they had to download all of their existing data. That’s not the case with Glancee.

There’s loads of speculation about how Facebook might utilise the location based technology but little discussion on what Glancee actually offered.

Glancee was akin to a ‘friendly stalker’ facility. As its promo material originally stated, “Glancee quietly works for you throughout your day, looking for people nearby and keeping track of the people you meet.”

Having mined your personal data is could, “Discover the hidden connections you share with people around you.”

GoMobile News particularly likes the Glancee’s Radar feature which knew who was close by at the time. Another belter was the Glancee’s Diary.

Forgotten exactly what happened on that bender last night? Well, the Diary could tell you who else was at an event the previous night.

So work out who to apologise to. Or who owned the hat you woke up with on your head the next morning.

Now this is all very ‘neat stuff’. It could probably knock the standard Facebook ‘Check In’ facility into a cocked hat.

The big question is … How can Facebook monetise such capabilities? Can it be used to create services that people would actually pay for? Could it bring it more advertising?

Those observers who blandly suggest it should help with Facebook’s impending float should ask themselves – why and exactly how will it do so?