Facebook has acquired Moves, a motion tracking app, according to a blog post by the company. The financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed yet. It’s also not clear how much funding the company had raised.
Post acquisition, Moves app will continue to operate on its own as a standalone experience. However, Moves crew will join Facebook’s team to work on building and improving Facebook’s product and services. Additionally, there are no plans to integrate Moves data on Facebook’s platform.
Moves, which is available on Android and iPhone as a free app, tracks your walks, jogs, bike rides, among others. It also maps the places that you visit and the track you followed. The app appears to use the accelerometer of the phone and hence doesn’t really gives an accurate counts. This is exactly how Runtastic Squats app works on Android. Many a time, when I am in a session the app actually counts my movements as one squat.
Facebook’s acquisition of Moves hints the company’s entry into the fitness and software market. Wearable tech market is about to explode. What makes me wonder is why would Facebook go for an app that comes without any hardware support. Sooner or later, it will have to experiment with hardware.
Another thing that’s worrisome is whether users want to give so much of personal data to Facebook. Facebook doesn’t really have a good track record of managing user’s data. Couple of quarters ago, it shamelessly pasted a users profile picture on an ad, until it faced some user backlash.
In a way, Moves seem to be perfect fit for Facebook as it provides API for third-party developers to build software using its data. According to a report by Techcrunch, access to the API will remain open under the new ownership. If Facebook is able to collect a lot of user data, this could be a way to monetize it.
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