It’s a big day for M&A. The latest of today’s deal announcements is the news that Groupon has acquired Ditto.me, the mobile app for discovering and planning new places to go with friends. Ditto announced its sale in an entry on its company blog. Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Ditto’s service will eventually be shut down as part of the integration into Groupon.

The winding down of Ditto also indicates that for Groupon, this may have been mostly about bringing on talented employees through an “acqui-hire.” Hiring good engineers and designers is tough these days, and Groupon has been on a shopping spree of sorts when it comes to mobile and location apps, so this looks like a smart deal all-around.

In addition to letting users plan places to go and things to do, Ditto.me would also let people canvass their friends for tips — signaling that they want to eat, but don’t know where, for instance. That’s when the social recommendation aspect of the app would kick in. Overall, Ditto was a nice twist on the classic location check-in app, and from a UI perspective it was quite well-designed. But the fact that Ditto is going to be sunsetted right away post-deal may indicate that its traction was not all that it might have hoped. It’ll be interesting to see what the team cooks up in the months ahead, now that it is a part of Groupon.

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