Facebook, not exiting?

In a world of M&A it is refreshing to see a company who certainly is one of the, if not the, hottest bachelors around make it seem as though there strategy may not be a buyout. I just read on techcrunch that Facebook has made it’s first acquistion - and the lucky company? Parakey.

Huh, I hadn’t heard of it either, but it’s made by the same guys who co-founded Firefox. It purports to be a web OS. Now I’ve heard that claim a lot and have thus far been quite the opposite of impressed… you know. Unimpressed. But here’s the thing that caught my attention. This was quote from a talk at IEEE Spectrum:

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.

So, in and of itself, just like an OS, it provides very low level functionality. It helps you manipulate all sorts of objects you have, whether they are word files, emails, music, whatever - synchronizing your desktop to the web. That in itself, is becoming the hot topic as companies like Versionate and Google Docs vie to control your office docs online - they take what normally would be on your desktop and move it to a website. Parakey, on the other hand seems to want to link online and your desktop - giving you the best of both worlds.

Historically (in my opinion) the major failing with these Web OS’s is on the application side. Nobody’s building killer apps for them - so whatever promise they may have had gets lost in the lack of being able to actually do anything. Well, now… Facebook just launched it’s API and has no shortage of people who can’t build apps for the website fast enough. That seems like quite a combination to me, if Facebook can become an entire web application where you can easily store all your files (whatever they may be) and update which ones you want to be public facing. And on top of that have all these applications that leverage not just an incredible social network but a robust underlying operating system?

If that’s the plan and they can pull off an interesting integration of Facebook and Parakey, that is genuinely an amazing combination. If it works well, it could really change the way a lot of things work - by putting everything in one place. A very compelling mix of functionality and one stop shopping. So you keep all your music up there with your playlists, check off which playlists are public and now everyone can see it, check off show what I’m listening to now and it’s done, (get the RIAA’s permission) and let people listen to your own radio station. Or for you more corporate types, keep your word docs up there and create a group of friends that’s just your company and share that amongst them. They can update the doc as necessary since it’s all there - and you’ll save all that email space, since you can mail links but there’ll still just be one copy.

To me that sounds like a company with aspirations grander than to make a quick $8billion getting sucked into a larger company. That sounds like a company that wants to go on it’s own and be the one doing the buying.

Jul 20th, 2007 · Comments RSS · · · · · Tags: m&a · web2.0