Facebook Buys Web-Desktop Unifier Parakey

Facebook, a social-networking site that has become an open development platform, announced Thursday that it purchased startup Parakey for an undisclosed amount. The company, started by Mozilla Firefox cofounders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, has been creating products to unify and integrate desktop applications and the Web.

"Parakey is a platform for building applications that merge the best of the desktop and the Web," a statement on Parakey's site said. The applications, which work offline but are "accessible from anywhere," are intended to be both "useful and social." At their new company, Hewitt and Ross will work on the Facebook Platform and the Web site.

Increasing Visitor 'Engagement'

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg found parallels between the duo's Firefox and Parakey work and his company's own platform for social-networking applications. Ross and Hewitt, Zuckerberg said in a statement, "turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they've established, not unlike what we've done with the Facebook Platform."

Parakey could provide a tool that helps Facebook in its effort to increase the "engagement" of its visitors, said Yankee Group analyst Jennifer Simpson. While user-generated content is important for social-networking sites, she noted, only a small number of users are actually providing that content.

"If Facebook had a tool that better facilitated this," she said, "it can drive people to put more content online."

Inducing people to put more content online has been a major thrust of Facebook's. Last year in October, for instance, the company announced that a sharing function would allow users on other sites to click a link and upload content to Facebook without leaving the other site.

Millions of Registered Users

There have been several third-party applications developed for the Facebook Platform, which includes a Facebook markup language and site APIs. These applications have included tools for social bookmarking, sharing listening habits, and sharing videos.

In developing the platform, Zuckerberg is trying to leverage the site's 31 million registered users, a volume that makes it the sixth most-trafficked site in the U.S., according to comScore's MediaMetrix. The users are members of more than 47,000 social networks within Facebook, representing various schools, companies, or regions. A user can be a member of more than one of the networks.

In fact, the site, founded in 2004, does not describe itself simply as a social-networking site. Instead, it characterizes itself as "the Internet's leading social utility" that "helps people better understand the world around them by developing technologies that facilitate the spread of information through social networks."

yahoo.com/