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Facebook buys Firefox startup

Firefox co-founders get networking

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Facebook, the ubiquitous, in-your-face social [cough] networking website, has acquired Parakey, a startup run by the co-founders of Mozilla Firefox.

Financial terms of the deal, which was announced on 19 July, were not disclosed.

It's the first acquisition made by California-based Facebook since it launched in 2004.

Explaining the rationale behind partnering with Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg said: "The work they've done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook."

Parakey was founded by the Firefox pair in early 2006 with the aim of building a platform that merged information on the web with the desktop.

Ross and Hewitt's increasingly popular open source, free web browser has, to date, been downloaded worldwide more than 300 million times.

The two men will work on the development of Facebook's platform, which currently has 31 million registered users, and the firm's website.

In related news, Zuckerberg will be in court this week defending himself against accusations that he stole the idea for Facebook from three former fellow students at Harvard . ®

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Latest Comments

Anyone who says Facebook is boring...

...obviously hasn't added the Scrabulous application. Seriously, that sh1t is addictive.

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Very Useful

Being at university right now, it's great for keeping in touch with friends, finding old friends from yonks ago and sharing photos, organising events etc. MySpace is horrible by comparison, it just spam. Plus nearly all my friends use Facebook, so it's one destination, and easy to contact anyone I know - without worrying (as someone said above) whether their phone number is current, or they still live in the same city etc.

Applications on Facebook do have the potential to ruin it, but I like the way they've made everything take a Facebook-like appearance, the thing that turned me off MySpace was all the flashing boxes everywhere...but they're a great way of implementing features which you wish had already been put in (like Last.FM integration).

I still talk to everyone on IM, but if you want to leave someone a non-urgent message that you're certain they will get, then Facebook is so much preferred.

I can't say that I've ever met anyone on Facebook itself - I don't think it's for that really.

I do agree with the privacy point though - we are all putting a lot of personal information up about ourselves, and although Facebook lets you limit who can access it, once you accidentally grant the wrong person access to it...addresses, phone numbers, email address, relationship status, hobbies, too much potential for wrongdoing.

+ It's a great source of procrastination!

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@Cliff

What's wrong with the lack of format in a messaging system exactly? I manage with plain-text SMS and not a single Outlook template (*shudder*) in sight.

The added benefit of Facebook over e-mail is that I can centralise my contacts and THEY update their addresses (rather than me repeatedly losing them due to loss/theft/accident/laziness).

I agree on the application side though. Where the hell did they all come from suddenly? Was much happier when Facebook was a simple but effective tool.

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