Facebook buys venture by Firefox founders

by Jennifer Whitehead, Brand Republic 20-Jul-07, 09:00

LONDON - Facebook, social networking phenomenon of the last few months, has bought a technology start up run by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of the Mozilla Firefox web browser.

Facebook has paid an undisclosed sum for Parakey, a company that is developing software that will make it easier for computer users to store and share information and files they have stored on their desktops, on the web.

In an interview late last year, Ross explained that the service will "unify the desktop and the web", and solve the problem that people have in having to visit different sites and use different folders to do the things they want to do online, such as upload their photographs to Flickr or upload their videos to YouTube. Parakey describes its mission as making consumers' lives easy.

There are few details of what Parakey will offer product wise, but the descriptions of what it is doing appear similar to ideas such as Google Documents, where users can save a variety of documents in one place and share them with others. They are natural extensions of Facebook's social networking service.

Facebook said that Ross and Hewitt would join the company to work on the development of the Facebook platform and on the website.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said: "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.

"The work they've done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook."

Firefox is a free web browser that is rapidly stealing share from Microsoft Explorer, and has been downloaded 300m times.

Facebook is a similar hit with web users, with 31m registered users globally. The acquisition of Parakey is Facebook's first -- it is more usually in the position of being discussed as a potential acquisition rather than an acquiree.