Facebook wants to track your workouts.
On Thursday, the social networking giant announced that it had acquired ProtoGeo Oy, a Helsinki-based outfit that offers a fitness-tracking smartphone app called Moves. The startup joins a fleet of other recent Facebook purchases that are helping Mark Zuckerberg and company expand their reach beyond Facebook's primary social network. As Zuckerberg recently noted in an interview with The New York Times, the company wants to unbundle "the big blue app."
Traditionally, Facebook did whatever it could to ensure that no matter what people were doing online, be it sharing photos or playing games, they did it on Facebook proper. But in a world where so much of our computing has shifted onto smartphones and tablets -- where standalone apps rule -- the company has shifted its strategy. In the future, Facebook will no longer be just one app, but many different apps for many different things, all powered by Facebook. This strategy was most evident recently when Facebook said it would not longer handle chat on its main app, pushing text messaging onto a separate app called Messenger.
>Like may tech giants -- from Apple to Google -- it seems that Facebook has an eye on the so-called Internet of Things, a movement that will see computing move well beyond phones and tablets and onto all sorts of other devices.
With Moves, Facebook is staking its claim in the growing fitness app market, already dominated by the likes of RunKeeper and Nike+. But it may also be looking ahead to the burgeoning market for wearable devices. Many fitness apps already dovetail with devices you wear on your wrist. Like other tech giants -- from Apple to Google -- Facebook has an eye on the so-called Internet of Things, a movement that will see computing move well beyond phones and tablets and onto all sorts of other devices.
Facebook has demonstrated interest in the world of wearables for some time now, holding hackathons to develop new apps for products like the Pebble smart watch. The problem is, until now, many of the apps under the Facebook umbrella wouldn't have made much sense on a smart watch or similar device. Moves does. Though it's not a hardware company, it would, in theory, give people a reason to wear Facebook (or at least, a Facebook property) on their wrists.
Neither company has released many details about what will change post-acquisition, but you can expect that a Facebook-powered fitness app will be much more social. While other apps like RunKeeper enable social sharing, this one, in all likelihood, will put social first. Facebook head of mobile Erick Tseng has already indicated as much, telling the audience at a New York City tech event last fall: "Wearables really come to life when you use them to connect to other people, not just collect data."
Of course, Moves does collect data, and lots of it. The app works with the phone's existing motion sensors to track where users move throughout the day. Though the startup said in a blog post that it would continue to operate independently and that "there are no plans to change that or commingle data with Facebook," only time will tell how Facebook chooses to use that valuable data in the future.
