Facebook has acquired the team behind community story sharing service Storylane, its CEO Jonathan Gheller said in a post on the site today. The acquisition, first noted by GigaOm, is of the team behind the newly launched Storylane, and not of the product itself.
Storylane was a ‘story telling’ site that bent the personal blog paradigm in ways reminiscent of Obvious Corp.’s Medium. Facebook, exemplified by its latest News Feed redesign, has been trying to rejuvenate its standing as a place where people share photo-centric stories and read those stories, rather than simply resign itself to being a place where people dump stuff because they feel obligated.
Gheller says that, after two years working on ” trying to help people better communicate who they are and what they care about, improve the way we do business with each other, find love and make new friendships” the team is moving on.
“After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact,” says Gheller, “we are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook. This is an exciting opportunity. Facebook’s mission of connecting the world has always been at the center of our work, and like our friends at Facebook, meaningful connections are what our team is most passionate about.”
The notice states that the stories that have been shared on Storylane are ‘yours to keep and share in [whatever] way you want.’ The service will be providing tools in the future to export your data or migrate it to other platforms. In what is likely a measure to head off speculation, Gheller notes that Facebook will not acquire any of the data users have shared.
Gheller goes on to thank investors in the company and the users who have contributed stories.
“Most of all, I want to thank our users. Your passion, sincerity and willingness to share, has made Storylane the incredible experience that exists today,” says the note. “We have learned so much from you. Your ideas and creativity will stay with us and inspire us on the next stage of our journey.”
Just a few days ago, Storylane launched an iPhone app for reading stories on the site and announced that it had some 200K stories shared on the service. That’s pretty much the first news we’d heard of the site since its launch late last year.
Image Credit: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images
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