Email marketing company Constant Contact announced that it has acquired startup NutshellMail for an undisclosed amount.
The move is supposed to expand Constant Contact's services into social networking. A growing number of companies bring social networking data into email, including Xobni, Gist, and Etacts. NutshellMail may offer the service that's best designed for casual users -- it delivers an email with select updates from users' social networks, and also lets them update their accounts through email.
NutshellMail is based in Menlo Park, Calif., and Constant Contact says the deal should help it move forward with plans to open an office in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year. The startup had raised a $600,000 seed round and was incubated by fbFund, the joint venture between Facebook, Founders Fund, and Accel Partners. Another fbFund company, GroupCard, was acquired last month.
Constant Contact is based in Waltham, Mass. and is publicly traded.