Facebook just bought up Divvyshot, a Y Combinator-backed startup that launched last March. Divvyshot was in the midst of raising an angel round when Facebook swept in with a better offer. The amount of the acquisition is not being disclosed, but it was likely small. Buying Divvyshot is a talent acquisition for Facebook. Founder Sam Odio and the two other Divvyshot team members will be joining Facebook and working on Facebook Photos, which is the largest photo-sharing service in the world.
Divvyshot is a group-sharing photo site which takes a slightly different approach than other photo sites. Most photo sites think of the photos as tied to the camera. Odio designed Divvyshot so that photos are tied to places, people, and events. So instead of 50 different shots of the same event, 50 people can all share the same photo. Facebook Photos works on a similar principle, if in a more ad-hoc fashion. People upload photos and tag the people in them. When you get tagged in someone else’s photo, it gets shared with you. If the Divvyshot acquisition is any indication, there will be many more ways to automatically share photos through Facebook in the future.
Divvyshot itself will be shut down. The site has 40,000 active, but loyal, users. Instead, Odio and his team will take what they learned at Divvyshot and apply it to the much larger canvas of Facebook Photos. Existing Divvyshot users will be able to continue to use the site, but no new accounts will be able to be created, and its iPhone app will be taken off of iTunes.
Currently, Divvyshot albums can be edited by multiple users, and can be set as private (only allowing designated friends to upload photos) or public, which lets anyone upload their photos to the album. All photos are presented at a fairly high resolution on the site, and are also available at their original quality for download (you can also download entire albums at a time as .zip files). Divvyshot has deep integration with photo services including Flickr, Facebook and Twitter so you can upload all your photos from these sites. The site recently launched an iPhone app that lets users upload and monitor event activity in real-time and contains much of the core functionality as the web application.
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