Facebook Acquires Parakey's Web OS Platform

NaijaGuy writes "Facebook has purchased Parakey for an undisclosed sum. We have previously discussed how Facebook recently opened up development opportunities for third-party developers. With this acquisition some observers have noted that Facebook might be trying to become a Google alternative, by providing an application development platform based on Parakey's technology. Facebook's 'Web OS' has also been discussed, and the company has made headlines partly because of the fame of one of its founders. Blake Ross helped launch Firefox, and it was enthusiasm for helping less geeky users like his mom to thrive on the web that got him through the doors of Netscape at the age of 15. A recent interview charts how that same enthusiasm led him to start Parakey, 'a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.'"

Everything?

What about bootstrapping the system. I'll venture a guess of no before even rtfa.

without RTFA

'a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do':

can it:

(1) boot your computer (without requiring local media and thus becoming more of a "real" OS)
(2) run photoshop / gimp / doom 3 / (insert resource-heavy app here)
(3) run without any loss of functionality when you're sitting in the middle of nowhere without a wifi hotspot

Sure, the answers may all be yes...but not without a lot of hacking at the reasons why.

ok now I *DID* RTFA

at least one of them. Why does /. insist on posting articles with tripe like this (particularly amusing snippets in bold):

Imagine that in 2-5 years time Facebook has become the No. 1 destination on the web. Facebook as a Web OS is the leader in online storage, online applications, email, blogging and of course social networking. How people interact with Facebook has changed; Facebook OS has absorbed Facebook F8, all previous Facebook applications work under Facebook OS, but they work more like Windows does today; Facebook has become your desktop and not just an internet site. The Facebook Paint application substitutes Photoshop, Facebook Email is a superior offering to Outlook, Facebook Office (Facebook having acquired either Thinkfree or Zoho) provides the market leading word processing and spreadsheet platform.

Why?

Why would they do it? They already created a facebook API and have a thriving developer community (and some slick apps btw). Wouldn't it be hard to integrate a different sort of code into what they have already? Or is this a defensive purchase?

CS320

"a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do"
I'm guessing you didn't make it to Operating Systems before you dropped out of Computer Science.

No, not everything an OS can do...

This has been discussed ad nauseum, even in the last Slashdot article, but: no, Parakey does not do "everything an OS can do" from a technical perspective, which is the only perspective most people here care about. That should be obvious. The quote was in the context of average users--people like my mother--who are not thinking about concepts like memory management. The idea is that Parakey accomplishes the functions of an OS (and much more) from an *end-user's* perspective.

I'm confident the truth won't stand in the way of another 200 posts on this topic :)

"Web OS?"

I suppose this sounds trollish, but frankly to me the very phrase just screams SLASHVERTISEMENT!, because no-one who knows what they're talking about uses language like that -- it's strictly a marketing term.

Google.

Of course, Facebook will soon be purchased by Google.

Parakey!

It's not margarine, it's Parakey!

Stop it!

The OS can already do everything that an OS can do.

Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.

Online office apps are pointless once somebody offers decent, cross platform, ad supported storage of data.

A web what?

So what can it do? Can it manage memory? What filesystems does it implement? Do you have fork(2) or an equivalent? What about TCP/IP? How are your hardware drivers?

Shouldn't you invest in a dictionary, son?

To me Parakey sounds more like..

A web portal with a very tightly integrated, extensible "smart client".

The following scenario sounded interesting: Plugging in your camera and having pictures automatically copied, sorted, ready to organize on your "local server", automatically publishing once you're connected to the website.

The bit about developing "applications" using JUL sounded interesting too. I wonder how much cross-over functionality this and Google Gears has.

-ds

'its what we call a "LASER"'

What does this mean for user freedom?

At first, hearing this pissed me off. Now it just makes me nervous, after reviewing some of the old and new information (neither of which amounts to much, given Parakey's stealth mode).

The number one thing that encouraged me about Parakey was that not only was it open source, it didn't fork over it's users control over to web services companies. Sure, Livejournal, for example) has its code released under a public license - but that doesn't stop LJ from locking in user data. Alternate instances of of LJ code son't interoperate, and I still can't make complete archives of all my posts, comments, and interactions on any social networking site. This is my life [movemydata.org], we're talking about - I don't want some company to have better access to it than I do.

Parakey, insofar as it was described in the Spectrum article, did the right thing here by making the user's desktop the central archive (using open code, and open formats, of course). My life would remain mine, and web services would simply syndicate it from its origin under my control.

From what I've been able to discover about the Facebook platform, it's not nearly as useful as the web interface is - there's tons of crap I've been bombarded with on the web pages after logging in, only a tiny fraction of which is actually accessible through the API. Given FB's dependency upon an advertising model, it doesn't surprise me at all that they want to hold my own social life hostage as a carrot to get me to use the web interface. Unfortunately, I'm not biting.

So my concern is, has Parakey bailed on the user-centered model in favor of the service-provider-centered model? It would be a shame.

Everybody wants to be the OS

Why does EVERY successful tech company suddenly want to be your OS? Christ, even Facebook now wants to be your OS. I ALREADY HAVE AN OS IN FACT WE ALREADY HAVE HUNDREDS OF OSES SO STOP TRYING TO REINVENT THE WHEEL. I look forward to the day when the computer operating system is something nobody thinks about anymore, and instead thinks more about new operations to add to this system. We have an industry full of people falling all over each other to reinnovate the first thing that was ever innovated in this space, because they are all telling stories to each other that lionise those who take over the whole product. These are the typical developer's heroes: people who forced an advantage in one application into a measure of control over the system. Their heroes are not the people who just design one application that is incredibly good at some goal, and then continue to focus themselves on that goal -- these sorts of people are just not 'thinking outside the box'. And 'thinking outside the box' usually means making the "intellectual" leap to you sitting on top of the box, owning the whole box -- i.e. the only thing you will allow outside the box you are building, is you. Thinking in this way about every possible product is thought in this particular society to make one brilliant, maybe even a genius. For some reason, this type of thought process is no longer called by its former name: 'ragingly narcissistic megalomania'. No, now it proves you are brilliant and insightful, rather than just nakedly ambitious to the point that you see a crown for yourself (and little else) in everything. Watching something REALLY stupid happen like the best social networking app that has ever lived trying to remake itself into the shittiest "operating system" that has ever lived, proves that the tech industry's self-image is fundamentally broken, and we need entirely new models for what is a 'smart' engineer, what is a 'good' design philosophy, and what is a tech 'hero'. Because we can't continue to thrive with a million little Bill Gateses like this; that ship has sailed, my friends. And it's not even a very intereesting ship. In the future people will get about as excited about new OSes as they do about new plumbing networks. Trust me, people, in the long view the application is the heart of our world, not the OS. The OS is a necessary evil: if you could get rid of it, you would. This is rarely true of the application. Therefore, ultimately, applications will be removed from operating systems to stand out on their own (the opposite of the current trend, and what would naturally REALLY happen if there weren't current technical advantages to functional integration that are very specific to today's tech level). Most filmmaker's don't make movies in the hopes of winning a role in the design of film projectors -- because the two arts are entirely unrelated, so it would be a stupid, broken way for an industry to self-motivate. And yet this is exactly how the tech industry does it. Even my social networking designers, who are faced with the task of writing an app to manage the most complex network we know (human society), seem to think of themselves primarily as faced with the task of winning a seat managing one of the most simplistic network designs we know (binary logic machines). It begs reason! In fact, the whole thing is so stupid in a decidedly 'Hitchhiker's Galaxy' way, that I call for the immediate destruction of the tech industry as a whole, followed by the more logical apportionment of the design of tools in each field to experts in that field: so that social networking sites will be designed by wannabe sociologists, instead of by wannabe driver writers.

Smart Guy

the facebook CEO is a smart guy, he is learning from the best of the best. I don't know if you ever seen he's keynote, but he sells a bit like Steve Job. He buys a bit like Google and he monopolize a bit like Bill Gates. give it a few year, if he manage to generate a yearly net worth of 100$ per users, he will be a billionaire.

Schoolmates

It's funny that Facebook bought Blake Ross's startup since Blake Ross went to high school (and was in the same class) as one of Facebook's original developers and main financier. Not a bad class of '99...