ReadWriteWeb

CNNMoney reports that Facebook has just acquired the location-based sharing service Gowalla. Sources say that Gowalla's employees will move to Facebok's Palo Alto offices and work on the Timeline feature, which is all about telling stories. Gowalla had recently shifted its vision to storytelling.

When Gowalla launched in 2009, it faced off against rival location-based social network Foursquare. Since then, Foursquare grew leaps and bounds in the location space, transitioning from a check-in service to a partner of daily deals giant Groupon. Gowalla got lost in the dust.

Read our full coverage of Gowalla, 2010 up to right now, after the jump.

Facebook has made an important new hire, bringing in a head of mobile developer relations to help steer the company's mobile ecosystem in what is sure to be a huge growth period over the next several years. James Pearce, formerly in charge of developer relations at Sencha, has accepted the job and leaving the framework company today, according to post on his personal blog.

Bringing in a person like Pearce is a very clear indication of where Facebook would like to go with its mobile platform. To understand where Facebook wants to go you have to know where it, and Pearce, have been.

Color, the photo-sharing social app that took the tech industry by storm when it announced $41 million in prelaunch funding shortly after SXSW in March, is almost complete with its pivot. As announced at Facebook's developer conference in September, Color has attached itself to the social network and wants to fundamentally change the notion of the status update. Augmented are the notions of the "elastic" implicit social graph and many vestiges of what Color was when it originally launched.

Color has now launched in private beta around the concept of visual Facebook status updates, called "visits." We explore the new color and its evolution below.

The Facebook+Journalists Page announced that now everyone can write posts with 60,000 characters, making status updates feel more like the not-so-often used notes feature, which doesn't appear at all in the Facebook Timeline-version at all.

The amount of characters one can write into a Facebook status update has been steadily increasing over the years, growing from 160 (how Twitter-like!) to 420, then to 500. In September, it reached 5,000. This new jump seems abrupt; the last big increase was 4,500 characters. This one is 55,000 characters, or 12 times as many characters as before.

Secure.me is a new security service that "offers consumers a way to regain control over their privacy on the Internet and social networks." Parents, too, can now monitor (stalk?) their children online.

"Our life has long merged with the online world," says co-founder Christian Sigl. "We use online services, social networks and mobile apps so actively that it's hard to keep track of every personal information about us, which is visible to others on the Internet - whether we put it there ourselves or it was placed there by friends, acquaintances or even completely strings."

Should young people and especially children be required to read the legal jargon found on social networks like Facebook and just take more control of their online security, or is that the responsibility of parents? Or should that actually be in the hands of services like Secure.me?

Today Facebook finally reached a settlement with the FTC over privacy concerns that have been haunting the social media behemoth as of late.

Facebook can't just up and change its privacy settings whenever it wants to. It must now obtain express consent from its users, first.

Since the settlement, Zuckerberg has penned a blog post outlining the Facebook features that the site has launched, which include friend lists, the ability to review tags before they appear on a profile, mobile versions of privacy controls, amount other notable updates. He also announced the splitting of the Chief Privacy Officer position into two parts, to be held by Erin Egan and Michael Richter in product and policy, respectively.

In September 2009, Baltimore-based software company WhoGlue Inc. filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Facebook. It claimed that Facebook "violated a patent awarded to WhoGlue in 2007 for an information management system to control personal information as human networks and technology increasingly mesh." The lawsuit was settled, and in early November 2011, Hardebeck sold his tiny two-person company, which consists of him and a developer in Berlin, to Facebook for an undisclosed amount.

Facebook may have acquired WhoGlue, but according to a repot from The Baltimore Sun, Hardebeck bought back "some assets, trademarks and customer relationships from Facebook." He has since renamed his company WhoGlue LLC.

This year's Facebook acquisitions are just the beginning of what's in store for the social media behemoth.

The European Commission is cracking down on the way Facebook gathers information about European users. A new EC Directive will ban targeted advertising unless users specifically say they want it. This is great news for European Facebook users, especially after the case of 24-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems who, in late October, started an online campaign aimed at forcing Facebook to abide by European data privacy laws.

The real question is: Why isn't this happening in America? All 800 million Facebook users agree to let the company use their personal information.

A Facebook spam attack has just hit the Facebook Help Center's Community Forum, flooding it with fake messages about livestreaming American football games. The spam appears to have come from compromised Facebook accounts, according to reports from Sophos. The suspicious activity was first reported by the unofficial Facebook privacy and security blog, aptly titled FacebookPrivacyAndSecurity.

There is a general thought going around the Internet that by making Android open source, Google has lost control of the platform as companies like Amazon and Facebook use to source code fork to create their own devices. It has been said that Google has lost the keys to Android and it was a mistake to let anyone outside of Google-approved original equipment manufacturers build off the platform.

Has Google really lost control of Android? By forking Android to their needs, have Amazon and Facebook really taken money out of Google's pockets? Probably not. In fact, with the Kindle Fire and rumored Facebook Phone, both Facebook and Amazon may have unwittingly become platform evangelists for the Android platform.