• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, April 13, 2012

Continuing to enhance its mobile operations, Facebook has acquired Tagtile, a mobile-centric customer loyalty service started last fall. The company’s offering centers on a free hardware device for merchants that customers using the Tagtile app can tap at checkout with their smartphones to earn loyalty rewards on purchases.

According to a TechCrunch story last October, the company was testing its Tagtile Cube hardware with 35 merchants in San Francisco, New York and Florida. In a message posted to its today, Tagtile said Facebook was acquiring “substantially all of our assets.” It also stated the company would continue to operate normally for now, “but Tagtile as it exists today won’t be part of what we do at Facebook.”

The social networking giant confirmed the acquisition in a statement released Friday afternoon. "We’ve admired the [Tagtile] engineering team’s efforts for some time now and we’re excited to have them join Facebook,” it read in part.

That puts this acquisition in the category of other recent Facebook acquisitions like Gowalla or Beluga, where it's essentially acquiring engineering talent and technology, rather than an established business or brand it plans to build on. It also sets it apart from the company’s $1 billion purchase earlier this week of popular photo-sharing app Instagram, which will continue to operate as a standalone unit within Facebook.

Still, the Tagtile deal underscores Facebook’s ongoing expansion into the mobile space, with the focus this time on mobile shopping technology. It also comes on the same day Facebook Offers went live, allowing small businesses to send promotions directly to users’ news feeds. The new ad format provides a Get Offer link people can click on to redeem coupons online or offline from merchants they’re fans of on Facebook.

Financial terms of the Tagtile acquisition were not disclosed.