Facebook ropes in Spool team; shuts down service

An official Spool blog post confirms that the five-strong team at the mobile bookmarking service has been roped in by Facebook. The social networking giant, however, doesn't seem to have any plans for acquiring the service, which appears to have been shut down. Spool confirms having sent an email to their users with their bookmarks attached as bookmarks.html with the subject of the mail reading - Spool has shut down: your bookmarks are attached to this email - on 1pm Pacific Time on July 14, 2012.

Facebook ropes in team at Spool

Spool instructs its users in a blog post to download the attachment to their computer/device. The post further asks users to consider services like Pocket or Delicious, if they're looking  out for another service to synchronize their bookmarks. It adds, "If you’ve signed up for another service, follow their instructions for importing bookmarks. You will not find instructions specific to Spool, but we’ve sent your bookmarks in a format that should be easy to import into most other services."

Informing users of their decision to move to Facebook, the post reads: "We started Spool to make content easy to consume on a mobile device. To accomplish this, we built some very sophisticated technology and developed a deep expertise in mobile software development. We firmly believe that solving these problems will be increasingly important as the world accesses the Internet primarily through mobile devices."

Based in San Francisco, Spool came about in late 2010 and was founded by Avichal Garg, a former Google product manager. Earlier this year, Spool raised $1 million in financing, and in an official post revealed its list of investors - SVAngel, Felicis Ventures, Start Fund, Charles River Ventures, Vivi Nevo, among others. 

Facebook recently grabbed headlines when it acquired Instagram for $1 billion. Both, Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook and Kevin Systrom, Founder and CEO of Instagram wrote in blog posts about their deal. According to Zuckerberg, Facebook has focused on photos to connect friends and families and now they'll be able to enhance that experience with "beautiful" mobile photos. Facebook has no plans to shut down Instagram unlike previous startups they've acquired. Zuckerberg writes, "... we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram's strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That's why we're committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people."