Facebook acquires Divvyshot for photo sharing

Photo sharing on Facebook is about to get a whole lot more interesting with Divvyshot team

Facebook has just bought Divvyshot, a photo service with a neat twist on social sharing. The site allows users to group their shots into collections called "events" that anyone can contribute to.

Divvyshot, a Y Combinator participant during the Winter 2009 session was founded in January 2009 with $10,000 in seed funding.

As part of the deal, Facebook will acquire many of the smaller company's assets and the Divvyshot team will be joining the Facebook engineering team to focus on Facebook photos.

Divvyshot founder Sam Odio goes on to elaborate on the exact timetable for the photo service's few remaining weeks of operation. Already, the site is accepting no new members and the iPhone application is no longer available for download. Within two weeks, event creation will be disabled; by the end of the month, photo uploading will be disabled; and at the end of six weeks, the site will redirect to Facebook.com.

"While this means Divvyshot as you know it will cease to exist, it’s important to realize that our unique approach to photos will live on," writes Odio. "This is an opportunity to touch hundreds of millions of users with the best parts of our product. That’s something we hope you can get behind."

Considering today's acquisition in light of recent news (like updated support for higher-resolution pictures), all signs indicate that Facebook wants to enhance the photo sharing section of its site to make it even more interactive and communal. Right now, Facebook Photos is pretty powerful, considering that users can upload massive amounts of pictures at no charge. Users can tag their friends and even assign locations to particular albums, but beyond that the capabilities for further interaction are somewhat limited.

Whether Facebook will directly implement Divvyshot's style of arranging photos into collections remains to be seen.