Facebook announced today that it has acquired Parakey, the startup created by Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. These are some really sharp guys that created a product that has been downloaded over 300 million times.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released (and are not important). What is important is that they got some talented guys on their team that know how to develop a platform. Will they even use any of the technology from Parakey? Not sure… but quite possibly they will. But it is the brain power and product/platform development expertise that these guys bring to the table that will valuable.

A little about Parakey: It is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer.

Could this be the beginning of facebook making the transition towards incorporating more robust desktop apps that connect with facebook? There are some huge opportunities there as well. Microsoft should pay close attention.

To quote Blake Ross: “Facebook platform is finally making it easy to share experiences with friends and family over the web… a goal Joe and I have worked towards for years… We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry.”

Blake and Joe will be working on the development of the facebook platform. The interesting thing is that these guys have something previously built something very similar to facebook with firefox: They built a platform and allowed the developer community to make it even better… sound familiar?

Technorati Tags: facebook, firefox, facebook platform, facebook acquisition, facebook brain power, blake ross, joe hewitt, parakey

Share this on: