It's in the cards: your favorite social networking site is coming to your desktop.
Facebook has acquired the startup Parakey for an undisclosed amount, the company announced Thursday. Along with the company, Facebook also gets Parakey's founders, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Ross and Hewitt are best known as the two key developers behind the Firefox, the open-source web browser now piloted by Mozilla.
Put simply, Parakey is a platform for internet-enabled applications that run on the desktop. Parakey apps behave like desktop programs – they accept input behaviors like drag and drop, have better security and are better able to access system resources – but they have the richer look and feel of web apps. On paper, the Parakey platform looks very much like AIR, the Flash-capable desktop runtime from Adobe.
What does this mean for Facebook? A desktop client for the service is the most likely outcome from the acquisition.
There's also a strong sharing element to the platform. In an interview
with IEEE Spectrum last year, Ross describes how Parakey users can run
a small web server on their machines to make assets like photos, music
and videos accessible to family or friends.
If the company uses Parakey's technology to build a downloadable application that can talk to Facebook, users will be able to "do Facebook" on the desktop. It wouldn't just be a copy of the website, though. Users would potentially be able to manage their Facebook profile and all of their assets – photos, contacts, calendars and so on – while offline in a local environment.
We'll probably also see better Facebook apps, as well. The web browser wasn't built to deal with half of the stuff Web 2.0 developers are throwing at it, so working beyond the limitations of the browser would open up new possibilities.
Either way, offline web apps are definitely in Facebook's immediate future.
Parakey stresses ease of use and accessibility as its main directives – they want to make useful and relevant apps that everyday users can grok. Tall order, but this may have turned out to be its biggest selling point.
