On Monday, MMW reported that social networking giant Facebook has quietly acquired Gowalla. Sources close to Gowalla said it’s a done deal, but no insight was provided at that time with regard to how much Facebook coughed up for the purchase.

Today we’re learning more about Facebook’s acquisition of the location sharing service.

“About two months ago, my co-founder Scott and I attended F8,” Gowalla CEO Josh Williams wrote Tuesday on the official Gowalla blog. “We were blown away by Facebook’s new developments. A few weeks later Facebook called, and it became clear that the way for our team to have the biggest impact was to work together. So we’re excited to announce that we’ll be making the journey to California to join Facebook!”

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Social networking giant Facebook has quietly acquired location sharing service Gowalla, according to reports surfacing over the weekend.

Sources close to Gowalla say it’s a done deal, but no insight was provided with regard to how much Facebook coughed up for the purchase.

“We don’t comment on rumor and speculation,” a Facebook rep told CNN in response to the leaked story.

Launched in 2009, Austin-based Gowalla went head-to-head with direct rival Foursquare — and lost. Badly trailing Foursquare in user adoption, Gowalla recently shifted directions, recasting itself as a travel guide.

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While the popularity of location-based services like Foursquare, Gowalla and many others have been in the spotlight over the last couple years, their popularity with mobile consumers might not match the hype.

According to a recent study conducted by Pew Research, checking in via geosocial services like Foursquare are the least popular activity among smartphone users.  While more than half of the smartphone owners in the survey of 2,277 adults report accessing social networks, sending photos and viewing email, just 12% of smartphone owners say they use checkin services.  Not surprising, the most popular activity was sending SMS messages.

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On Friday, comScore published the results of a new study of mobile social networking check-in service users based on data from its comScore MobiLens service.

According to the findings, there are areas of mobile services and practices that are yet to be widely embraced by the mobile community at large.

The study found that only 16.7 million US mobile subscribers used location-based “check-in” services on their phones in March 2011, representing a mere 7.1 percent of the entire mobile population. 12.7 million check-in users did so on a smartphone, representing 17.6 percent of the smartphone population.

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Since the beginning of the LBS revolution, many people have questioned the long-term viability of the concept from a usage standpoint.  A long-standing argument has centered around whether the act of “checking-in” via LBS apps like Foursquare and Gowalla will ever hit the mainstream.

It doesn’t help the cause when research is continually published indicating that just 1-4% of all connected users actively engage with an LBS app.  The fact remains that a majority of users wont use such apps over the long-term unless it provides unique value.  Rather than checking in simply for the sake of checking in, users will demand something in return.  LBS providers are slowly fulfilling that demand, which is why the future of LBS is as bright as ever.

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LBS mainstay Gowalla today debuted a major 3.0 update to its iPhone app — one that brings two major enhancements users have been asking for; a unified checkin solution and the ability to utilize a synced “places” database between Gowalla and other LBS apps like Foursquare and Facebook Places.

As the largest update to date, Gowalla 3.0 for iPhone now includes the ability for users to not only checkin on Gowalla itself, but to share those same checkins on Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter and even Tumblr.  The app now provides a solid “unified checkin solution,” which is something die-hard users and the industry in general has been waiting for.  In addition, you can now see checkins from all of your friends even if they don’t use Gowalla at all.

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With all the hype surrounding LBS services like Foursquare and Facebook Places, it’s easy to forget that the concept is still extremely limited in terms of wide-spread usage.  A new study by Pew Research underscores this data point by indicating that only 1 percent of online adults are using location services.

Men are twice as likely as women to be among these users, according to the research, and location services are more popular among Hispanic users, at 10 percent, than among white users (3 percent) or black users (5 percent).  The adoption is non-surprisingly being driven by those in the 18-29 age group, with the research showing 8% of this demographic uses LBS services on any given day.

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