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If Facebook is the Brangelina of tech, then Silicon Valley's it company just adopted an Ethiopian baby. So to speak. The baby is Parakey, a startup cofounded by Blake Ross, the Firefox programmer profiled in Wired, and fellow Firefox developer Joe Hewitt. Ross has been promising more details on Parakey since last November, but they haven't been forthcoming. Parakey's website just tells you to "give your computer the bird." Here's what that means — and what the acquisition means for Facebook.


Today, websites are still dependent on PCs. Say you want to move photos from your camera to Flickr? They have to take a pit stop on your PC along the way. Parakey aims to shortcut that and let you move things directly to the Web, and from one website to another. That's a very different aim from most so-called "Web operating system" startups, which mostly provide a crude copy of your computer's desktop environment.

And what does that portend for Facebook? Well, Facebook could just be acquiring Parakey to add Ross and Hewitt to its engineering ranks. Companies like Cisco do acquisitions like that all the time; in fact, some analysts price acquisitions in terms of the number of engineers they bring to the purchaser.

But Facebook has made no secret of its ambitions to be a computing platform, not just a social network. Being MySpace, which sold for $580 million, is nice, but aspiring to be Microsoft, worth $300 billion, is way better. Already, people store photos, bookmark URLs, and look up friends' contact information on Facebook. Why not store all kinds of files and data there, too, and make Facebook a hub for people's interactions with other websites?

It's a big, ambitious goal, and one Facebook will likely never, ever achieve. But it sounds good on paper, and it's exactly the kind of vague but promising technical arcana that gets investors worked up about an IPO. The more uncertain a company's plans, the more likely shareholders are to see all the possibilities, and bid up its valuation accordingly. Heck, since Facebook's value is a complete guessing game, why don't we just say this deal adds another billion dollars to the total?