Facebook continues to expand itself. The social networking giant has acquired location sharing service Gowalla, according to a source close to Gowalla. Facebook declined to comment on the deal saying that it won’t comment on rumor and speculation.

Photo: Facebook users can sign up to Gowalla with using their account,
a snapshot from Gowalla’s frontpage

The sum of the deal is undisclosed but its known that most of Gowalla’s employees, including founder Josh Williams, will move to Facebook’s offices in Palo Alto to work on Facebook’s Timeline feature. The Timeline was presented at this year’s F8 conference and is currently rolling out to Facebook’s 800 million members. Some Gowalla employees will stay in Austin and work out of Facebook’s local office there.

The Austin-based Gowalla was launched in 2009 as a sharing service but lost in a competition with Foursquare. Recently, Gowalla started to position itself as a geolocation service. The site had raised around $10 million over the years from backers including the Founders Fund, Greylock Partners and a collection of angel investors, says CNN.

The Facebook’s deal has not yet been publicly announced yet but the source that preferred to stay anonymous commented saying: «It’s a perfect match. As far as the big picture, Gowalla’s vision is about people telling stories, and Facebook’s vision for Timeline is about stories about important moments in life.»

Facebook is famous for buying promising startups and killing them off to deploy their engineers and developers on other projects. Its hit list includes Beluga, Hot Potato, Drop.io, Snaptu, Digital Staircase, among more than a dozen others. Probably, Gowalla has the same destiny, on the Facebook’s profit.