Facebook Acquires Web OS Company Parakey
How considerate of Facebook to wait until Read/WriteWeb's Facebook Week to announce their first major acquisition. For an as-yet-undisclosed sum, Facebook has acquired Parakey, a Web OS company founded by Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Read/WriteWeb was one of the first blogs to profile Parakey last November, and at the time Richard MacManus said that Parakey had "the potential to help bridge the current gap between Web and desktop applications."
Ross describes Parakey as "a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do." Here's a quote from an IEEE Spectrum article that I think explains what the still-unlaunched Parakey is attempting to be pretty well:
"Today, something like e-mail can involve two completely different experiences, depending on whether or not you’re using the Web -- Outlook versus Hotmail, for example. A Parakey e-mail program, on the other hand, provides a single access point for your mail, "unifying the desktop and the Web," in Ross’s words. Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive -- e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars."
The big question is, what does Facebook want with Parakey? It seems fairly clear that Facebook wants their platform to become the OS for the web, but now it also seems that perhaps they want to be come the operating system period.
TechCrunch is reporting that Google may also have been a bidder for Parakey. Considering Google's moves into the web platform space and the long standing rumors of a Google OS, that wouldn't surprise me.
What do you think about Facebook's acquisition? Does this make sense for the company? Does this signal that they are trying to compete with Redmond? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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I didnt see this one coming. Im really interested in seeing what kind of developments come out of this. Did they acquire Parakey to push it's development... or do they have something else in mind? hmmm.
Dear Madam or Sir
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
I think this is a great move by Facebook. Even if Parakey never saw the light of day, getting Joe and Blake is a great coup.... and now we know that we will see a great iPhone interface on FB. Maybe they can fix some of the other issues? ;)
http://www.almaer.com/blog/archives/001546.html
I am excited to see what they come up with over there.
Cheers,
Dion
Very interesting, regarding taking Redmond heads on, I would rather say that this is eventually going to be more of a collaborative product. Remember, this will not replace the basis OS, and hence Redmond has no threat to its core business. It may well be that Redmond is waiting for the right time (until its search matures enough) to take Google totally heads on. Given Oozie/Zuckerburg relationship, I would not be surprised if this lays the seed of Redmond potentially partneing/acquiring Facebook
Hi Josh,
These guys didn't start Mozilla, they created Firefox. Do you think Parakey is now going to become a closed-source application?
It occurs to me that Facebook may have acquired Parakey just to get a chance to hire on Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Stranger things have happened.
I just lost respect for you as a writer. I haven't been reading this blog in a while and tuned in to find out what was going on, and am forced to gag upon a buffet of facebook.
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....
I guess that answers the question I posted just a few hours ago:
http://changingway.org/2007/07/19/is-facebook-week-over-yet/
Josh, the link from "Parakey" is rather weird. It goes to:
http://www.getparakey.com/
which in turn goes to:
http://www.parakeyos.com/
which is all about eyeOS.
My gut says it's a talent buy. It's the only reason Google would bid on an unlaunched product (They can develop anything they want internally - so all their acquisitions boil down to talent or marketshare). So it stands to reason Facebook was interested in the same thing - that and I can't imagine how they'll integrate it.
Hmmm, Facebook Week Backlash. Mike, I'm mystified as to why us delving into FB for a week has upset you so much. What we do here on R/WW is analyze trends and web technology. FB just happens to be the hottest trend right now, so that's exactly why we need to look at it more closely. Is the hype justified? Well I posted on exactly that here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_open_is_facebook_really.php
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 :-)
@Mal: Right, I knew that! Thanks. Fixed. :)
@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. :)
I think Facebook is being too ambitious here, and maybe getting carried away by their own 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.
I think Facebook is generally overhyped but there is a difference between hype and analysis and I've enjoyed this weeks coverage from R/W.
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.
Hi Richard,
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
Blake,
Thanks for the heads up. I've updated the post with the proper link and a mashup logo.
So a possibly interesting technology dies thru acquisition. assume that all the tools that Parakey might have been built will be restricted to Facebook's own private island/world, and will be "open" only to Facebook apps.
Parakey is still not a "Social OS", that the world needs.
Facebook is first and foremost a closed social network - and a very good one for sure. But, even after opening up their applications API for third party developers, it is still a closed information silo centered on relations between people.
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(!)
Guys, they have a lame business model. Now I see on TechCrunch that the lead (drama inducing) title is whether FB can be the next Microsoft? Is that a joke? They have bought all hook line and sinker. It's appalling.
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.
Richard, be as objective as possible about FB. Do they really, truly have any sustainable competitive advantages? None that I can see. The so-called "depth" in their feeds is more hype than reality.
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.
Josh, it's "IEEE Spectrum," NOT "IEEE specutrum". Obviously, you're not a techie. "IEEE Spectrum" is the IEEE's flagship publication. You do know who the IEEE is, don't you?
I think that's pretty clearly a typo as "specutrum" isn't a word, David (which I've fixed). But thanks for pointing it out so politely...
I goes to show that a webos is more useful than one thinks though.
It has inheritadly solved a number of problems associated with managing several apps as both idividual apps and also as interconnected suites of apps, sometime on the same page and sometimes not, that collaborates and share data inbetween themselves seamlessly.
The term 'webos' is misleading, but it doesn't seem to be a better term around right now.