Facebook acquires Moves diarising app

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Facebook has acquired activity diary and fitness app Moves to add to its portfolio of companies.

Moves was launched in January 2013 and has since been downloaded more than four million times.

The app allows you to map your daily activity and monitor exercise including walking and running. You can also plot where you have stopped, whether at your office, a restaurant for lunch, a coffee in the afternoon or at home.

A blog post by Moves said: "We're joining Facebook's talented team to work on building and improving their products and services with a shared mission of supporting simple, efficient tools for more than a billion people.

"For those of you that use the Moves app the Moves experience will continue to operate as a standalone app, and there are no plans to change that or commingle data with Facebook."

This is just latest the acquisition for social network Facebook. Last year, the company bought photo filter and social networking app Instagram and then announced plans to combine user data between the two companies.

Facebook said at the time it may share information between its own service and other businesses or affiliates that Facebook owns to "help provide, understand, and improve our services and their own services."

The company acquired free messaging platform WhatsApp for $19 billion (11.3 billion) in February and virtual reality specialist Oculus in March for $2 billion (1.2 billion).

There was a backlash by fans of Oculus when the deal was announced, with Minecraft creator Markus Persson speaking out against small, innovative companies being bought out by the social giant.

He wrote in a blog: "I definitely want to be a part of VR, but I will not work with Facebook. Their motives are too unclear and shifting, and they haven't historically been a stable platform. There's nothing about their history that makes me trust them, and that makes them seem creepy to me."

Neither Facebook nor Moves revealed how much money the deal was worth or any other particulars of the acquisition.

Clare Hopping
Freelance writer

Clare is the founder of Blue Cactus Digital, a digital marketing company that helps ethical and sustainability-focused businesses grow their customer base.

Prior to becoming a marketer, Clare was a journalist, working at a range of mobile device-focused outlets including Know Your Mobile before moving into freelance life.

As a freelance writer, she drew on her expertise in mobility to write features and guides for ITPro, as well as regularly writing news stories on a wide range of topics.