I am writing you to thank you for the great news that I just read. I do appreciate your thoughts regarding the purchase of Parakey.

Furthermore I do share your oppinion that Facebook is trying to jump on the Web OS wagon as soon as they can.

Let us all hope that the growing Facebook community will benefit from this purchase.

Yours faithfully

http://www.almaer.com/blog/archives/001546.html

I am excited to see what they come up with over there.

Cheers,

Dion

These guys didn't start Mozilla, they created Firefox. Do you think Parakey is now going to become a closed-source application?

Facebook is over-inflated, over-hyped, and having an entire WEEK dedicated to covering it is beyond ridiculous and feeds right into the frenzy.

I read this blog because I want a different opinion than the same tired ones that the blog-boys seem to regurgitate. And here I am reading more of the same old stuff. I'm vastly disappointed and won't be back.

Do you valley people EVER learn? Does 2001 mean nothing to you? You jump on bandwagons like i've never seen. It's as though being geeks (hey I include myself in that category) blinds you to whatever is "cool" and there you go running....

In that post I concluded that no, FB isn't as open as it claimed originally - indeed it is a closed, proprietary system.

But even so, there are a lot of great things happening on the FB platform - so doesn't that justify us analyzing those things? I for one have learned a lot about FB writing about it this week, and reading the other r/ww authors posts on it.

And p.s. I'm not a "valley person" actually, and neither is Josh :-)

@Andrew: Yeah, I'm not sure what their relationship is with eyeOS. http://www.parakey.com/ is another URL of theirs, but gives even less information. Your best bet to find out about Parakey is to read Richard's excellent overview from last November (linked in the above post).

@Mike: As Richard said, I live about 3,000 miles from the Valley, and Richard even farther. ;) If you haven't already left, tune in tomorrow. In addition to my conclusion to the top 10 apps lists, I plan a post analyzing whether Facebook is just hype. :)

It would make more sense, in my opinion, to acquire the most successful apps. Not only would this provide further incentive to new app developers, but it would allow Facebook to bring high demand features in-house.

The Parakey aquisition seems odd to me as I don't really get the combination of social network and webos but still I'm looking forward to see where they go with it. The more competitiors to Google and Microsoft the better.

Thanks for covering this. The website you are linking to (getparakey.com) and the logo you're using do not belong to Parakey. Our website is parakey.com.

Thanks,
Blake

Thanks for the heads up. I've updated the post with the proper link and a mashup logo.

Parakey is still not a "Social OS", that the world needs.

The most popular applications on Facebook are the ones that add value to the social exchange between the members. For example the iLike app, Top Friends, Visual Bookshelf and Cities I've Been to (many more of course). These are apps that help people present more dimensions about themselves to their networks of friends (and not so close friends), and they serve the main purpose of Facebook very well.

As a broader applications platform, I think Facebook has little appeal to people that are less inclined to conspicuous sharing in a social context. Though this could of course change if they expand their privacy controls and let users differentiate better between people they work with, traveled with, dated, and went to school with and so on – and allow them a private sphere separated from the social arena.

In general, I believe that multiple, open networks will work better over time in any internet context. People don't want to be confined to a single platform or network. The internet is just too big and has so low barriers to entry that no one will be able to dominate it Microsoft-style.

However, Facebook's strategic moves the past year has shown that they are opening up their service gradually. It will be interesting to see how far they will go. The next big question will be what the fickle high-school/college crowd will do when their parents add them as friends on Facebook…

A personal example – I wanted to post photos from our summer holiday on Facebook – but my sister asked me to use Live Spaces instead so that our father wouldn’t have to get a Facebook account(!)

I didn't necessarily mean that the salmon are all swimming upstream in Silicon Valley Creek but you are all still over-hyping them and jumping right into the overinflation that is feeding this frenzy and it's sad to see it. By "you all" i mean the geeks who write about this stuff, are the early adopters, and not necessarily in touch with what mainstream anyone else feels or does.

Prove to me how FB is a great business with a sustainable long term business model. It may stick around long term, or it may fall by the wayside (as did Friendster and I suspect MySpace will eventually, but I could be wrong).

I am not saying that what Zuckerberg has done isn't amazing for the time being - it is. But this koolaid is making me want to slit my throat. Josh I will wait for your post, unless you say it's the next Microsoft, then for sure I will be out of here.

So, do us all a favor and point out their SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGES.

Also, explain why Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and MySpace (or even LinkedIn) can't copy them.

And the fact that Jeff Pulver has switched from LinkedIn to Facebook is a random data point, not a mass exodus from LinkedIn.