It’s no secret that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is interested in scooping up more startups in order to bring their talent on board. From Firefox creator Blake Ross’s Parakey (acquired in 2007) through Gmail creator Paul Buchheit’s FriendFeed (acquired in 2009), Facebook has made some very high-profile talent acquisitions already.
This Fall, Zuckerberg got early access to his old friend Adam D’Angelo’s new question and answer site Quora and used it to ask: “What startups would be good talent acquisitions for Facebook?”
Other users of the site offered suggestions and people voted on those submitted company names. Quora is a tiny new site chock-full of Silicon Valley stars – guess which company was voted the best acquisition target?
The winner? Apture.com, the provider of rich multi-media embedded pop-up windows for newspapers and blogs. Founder Tristan Harris is a former Apple engineer who built the first ad server for Wikia, the for-profit arm of Wikipedia, before launching Apture 3 years ago. We’ve given the product a positive review.
Apture’s Harris writes by email: “We we’re big fans of Facebook and are super excited about Quora (congrats Adam and Charlie!), but based on the emails that have arrived in my inbox since this article was published I wanted to say that Apture is not for sale. On the contrary we’re actually aggressively hiring engineering to join the team and prepping for the release of the next version of Apture. We’re totally flattered by the vote of confidence from Quora users, but just wanted to set the record straight.”
The next most popular suggestion? Austin, Texas location based social networking service Gowalla. Gowalla is run by CEO Josh Williams, who previously built and sold small business invoicing service Blinksale.
Those sound like good suggestions and both got votes from other Facebook team members on Quora. Remember, this isn’t about what technologies should be integrated directly into Facebook – FriendFeed has become little more than an occasional test bed for Facebook feed developments. The question is about scooping up teams of red-hot developers.
Other suggestions offered include Dodgeball co-founder Dennis Crowley’s new location based social network Foursquare (it’s only a matter of time until Facebook starts doing location check-ins, right?) and social question answering service Hunch, built by Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake and engineering whiz Chris Dixon.
Who do you think would make a good talent acquisition for Facebook? Mark Zuckerberg wants to know.
