Facebook Acquires Parakey's Web OS Platform 64
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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From wikipedia (warning: I may have edited this just minutes ago):
That sounds like an ActiveX-esque security shit storm waiting to happen.
without RTFA (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Facebook BSOD!? (Score:1)
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Its as if a million routers cried out in terror...and were suddenly silenced.
I fear something terrible has happened.
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Here are a few examples of these applications:
ajaxWrite [ajax13.com] - Honestly, Google Docs is more usable, but ajaxWrite shows off how XUL can look exactly like a local application.
CanvasPaint [canvaspaint.org] - An MS Paint clone done with HTML 5 t
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That's your problem. Approaching everything from the "looks just like" and "pretends to be" perspective. Skinning his apps is the least possible problem a "Web OS" will have.
I'd think more along the fact that his "OS" doesn't have a security model, it runs on JavaScript (slow as hell, and Firefox is slower than slower than hell), it can't access local computer resources (hardware acceleration, big
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The closest that would EVER come to happening would be the possibility of remote bootstrapping, with replicating an installation image, or an X-like thin client.
A "Web OS" that runs through your browser seems ludicrous because even if it were ABLE to communicate with your hardware, there are so many layers between the site content and your h
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But you've got the problem that Web Browsers (and most "modern" languages like Java) are hideously inefficient for these sort of tasks. CSS/HTML/Javascript are being contorted to do things that they were never really meant to do.
The fact that firing up Firefox to look at my GMail (which is, by all accounts one of the more efficent "Web Apps") consumes considerably more CPU time and RAM than it does to fire up a fairly robust mail client is disturbing to say the least. Let's face it -- the Web is a sh
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Personally I prefer semantically encoded data to "applications" whenever possible, it's easier to reuse in unplanned ways (the same reason PDFs are prettier but less useful than HTML).
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I mean, as long as we're imagining, lets imagine a world-wide wireless mesh Interweb. Think of it as a series of wireless tubes.
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Exactly.
I've been using facebook for a few months, initially to keep an eye on what local people were getting up to. But with the sudden spate of "applications" (many of them both badly coded and pointless) I'm finding myself less interested in returning.
I'm sure the facebook people don't care because I'm still a member and get included in their statistics, but the "old" facebook was more useful, and less myspace-like.
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'nuff said.
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'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)
A bootloader is what loads the OS. One could argue that a web-browser is a boot loader, if you really had to. In any case, booting itself is not, nor defines, an OS.
(2) run photoshop / gimp / doom 3 / (insert resource-heavy app here)
You are talking about something arbitrary and relative. Of course it doesn't run Photosh
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Why? (Score:2)
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#1: Why would they do it? They already created a facebook API...
But the question just itching to come out is: Did they develop it with an API as they went -- even just to make their lives easier; or, did they shoehorn it in after the fact? It's sad when the latter takes place. The code is forked and anyone who is hopeful things are well and find themselves forked up because their code behaves differently than the original source.
#2: "a Web operating system tha
CS320 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm guessing you didn't make it to Operating Systems before you dropped out of Computer Science.
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No, not everything an OS can do... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm confident the truth won't stand in the way of another 200 posts on this topic
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Actually the phrase you seek is "software suite", not "OS".
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The "average user" can kiss my ass. Just because most people need anything technical dumbed down for them, does not make the dumbed down retard-speak the truth. I don't care who they're marketting their piece of shit software too, but if we're going to discuss it on a technically oriented website, we should call a spade a spade. These javascript/html/"ajax" abominat
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Last time you went with the "end-user" perspective I asked you: ok let it play a DVD then.
One day you'll realize you had to concentrate on the "much more" part that makes an online app/ui unique and market this as an "extension" of people's OS, versus pit your product aga
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"Web OS?" (Score:1)
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. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Take Gmail for instance. That was launched at roughly the same time as Facebook. Since then, Gmail has remained almost exactly the same. On the other hand Facebook has been adding features every other month and dramatically changing itself every year. The same goes for Google Calendar, orkut, Google Images, and virtually all of Google's products. Even Google Search itself is almost exactly the same as it was 7+ years ago (obviously the
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Parakey! (Score:2)
Stop it! (Score:2)
Stop trying to reinvent the wheel.
Online office apps are pointless once somebody offers decent, cross platform, ad supported storage of data.
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If you, let's say, make a presentation with your favorite online app, you can show it to everyone every time.
The same goes for Flash, Silverlight and other fancy web technologies. There is nothing "
A web what? (Score:1)
Shouldn't you invest in a dictionary, son?
To me Parakey sounds more like.. (Score:2)
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? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
Smart Guy (Score:1)
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Schoolmates (Score:1)