This afternoon nexstop, a mobile location service, announced that they had been acquired by Facebook. The small company served as a talent acquisition for Facebook, following a number of other acquisitions including Octazen, Divvyshot, and Sharegrove. As Marshall Kirkpatrick speculated this afternoon, it will most definitely help Facebook as they look to roll out a new location product, whenever that may be.

This afternoon, the founders of nextstop wrote:

nextstop.com will be shutting down on September 1, 2010, but we want to make sure that the amazing guides that nextstoppers have created live on.

If you are an existing user, you can continue to use nextstop for the next two months and can use our export tools to export your contributions to Picasa Web Albums, Google Maps, or download a set of PDF or HTML files for your guides. We hope with these options you’ll be able to retain all the work you’ve put into nextstop guides, albeit in a new form. You must export your guides by September 1.

Additionally, the company plans on releasing their database of places under creative commons in the coming weeks. In addition to building a location team, Facebook also needs to expand their mobile team, as more consumers make the shift over to mobile devices as their primary internet consumption device. Of particular interest was that nextstop functioned as an HTML 5 application within the browser, rather than being a downloadable app.

This continues a trend being set by a number of internet companies, including Google, who yesterday released an HTML version of their mobile site. We’d expect many other companies to follow suit as the time between new iterations of applications on the web are much quicker than downloadable applications. It will be interesting to learn more about the projects that the nextstop team begins working on at Facebook over the coming months.