Facebook Acquires Random Small “Sharing” Startup

VentureBeat is reporting that Facebook has acquired ShareGrove, “a small startup focused on creating private spaces for close friends and family to share content.”

The company presented at the DEMO conference (video below), of which VentureBeat is a partner, and offers a private “real-time space where a small group of friends or colleagues could interact” – something you’d think Facebook could build in a couple of weeks, particularly with its acquisition of Friendfeed.

Demo Presentation:

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ShareGrove has taken seed funding of between $100,000 – $500,000 from Elm Street Ventures. Its founders all worked together at Laszlo Systems before leaving to set up ShareGrove.

No figures have been released by either company but this is the statement on the ShareGrove website:

“We’re happy to announce that we’ve reached an agreement for Facebook to acquire our assets, and that we’re joining the Facebook engineering team! We’ve always thought that Facebook had a great product, and through this acquisition process, we’ve found out that there’s a great team behind it. Now we’re excited to bring some of that Sharegroviness that you know and love to Facebook.

This means that we’re winding down Sharegrove operations starting today, and new user registration is now disabled. We’ll leave the service running until June 1st, at which point we’ll shut it down completely. If you have data stored on Sharegrove that you’d like to retrieve in bulk, we will do our best to accommodate your request. Please email us at info@sharegrove.com. Otherwise, for security purposes, we’ll delete all of our users’ personal information, as well as their posts.

We want to thank each one of you for using our service. It’s been a tremendous experience for us, and we’re excited to bring our knowledge and passion to Facebook.”

Video Demo of ShareGrove