Facebook ‘Poke’ Leads to Awkward One-Night Acquisition

Well would you look at that. Facebook has gone and bought itself a company. Yesterday, the nauseatingly overhyped social-networking site made its first acquisition, purchasing (for an undisclosed sum) Parakey, a start-up run by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, the engineering duo who created Firefox.

“Blake and Joe built the Firefox Web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform,” said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

I guess they must. Facebook describes Parakey’s technology as a platform “bridging the gap between information on the Web and the desktop.” Which should go quite well with Facebook’s platform of “bridging the gap between Friendster (or TheGlobe.com) and a successful multibillion-dollar exit plan.”