In the wake of Facebook’s acquisition of photo-sharing service Instagram, the social network hired the seven-member team that runs competitor Lightbox on Tuesday.
The Lightbox mobile photo-sharing service plans to shut down as of June 15.
Co-founders Thai Tran and Nilesh Patel posted a farewell to their user community: “We started Lightbox because we were excited about creating new services built primarily for mobile, especially for the Android and HTML5 platforms, and we’re honored that millions of you have downloaded the Lightbox Photos app and shared your experiences with the Lightbox community.”
“Today, we’re happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we’ll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook’s 500+ million mobile users,” added Tran and Patel.
The seven-member staff of London-based Lightbox will join Facebook, but the deal is not an acquisition of the company or its user data. “So it’s obviously another step toward figuring out mobile for Facebook,” reports AllThingsD. “The company realizes it needs mobile talent; Facebook acquired mobile discovery start-up Glancee last week, and of course bought Instagram last month for a whopping $1 billion.”
Lightbox has “promised to open source portions of the Lightbox code and post them in a Github repository” reports WebProNews. This will allow for the possibility of a Lightbox clone in the future.
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