• by Steve Smith  @popeyesm, May 7, 2012

Mobile social app maker Glancee announced at its Web site late last week that it had been acquired by Facebook. The app uses a member’s Facebook network to find friends in the vicinity and discover new potential contacts.

No terms or details of the acquisition were disclosed. At the Glancee site the founders said:

“We started Glancee in 2010 with the goal of bringing together the best of your physical and digital worlds. We wanted to make it easy to discover the hidden connections around you, and to meet interesting people. Since then Glancee has connected thousands of people, empowering serendipity and pioneering social discovery. We are therefore very excited to announce that Facebook has acquired Glancee and that we have joined the team in Menlo Park to build great products for over 900 million Facebook users. We've had such a blast connecting people through Glancee, and we truly thank our users for being a part of the Glancee community.”

Apparently, Facebook has its own plans for the mobile app technology, since the Glancee app was no longer available in the iTunes App Store as of this past weekend. Presumably, Facebook could integrate the location-based technology from Glancee into its own app to make friend finding within physical locations a feature of the social network. Rival social nets like myYearbook have been using proximity searches for years to help their members find new friends in a given area.

Facebook’s interest in all things mobile comes in advance of its road show for investors to pitch the initial public offering for later this month.  By its own admission in its earlier filings for the IPO, Facebook’s mobile strategy is underdeveloped even though a majority of its users access the service over devices. The Glancee acquisition gives them a more sophisticated reach into location-aware mobile technologies at the same time that it adds greater functionality to the service. As the IPO loom and investors look at the long-term prospects for Facebook, there is concern about its longevity. After all, predecessors such as Friendster and Myspace once seemed to dominate the space.