Facebook(R) Acquires Startup Parakey

July 20, 2007; 06:53 AM

Facebook, the Internet's leading social utility, today announced that it has acquired Parakey, a startup run by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox, an open-source and non-profit web browser. Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook's team to work on the development of Facebook Platform and the company's website.

"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 Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. "The work they've done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook."

Ross and Hewitt are best known as the co-founders of Firefox, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times by people worldwide. Hewitt went on to build popular web development tools such as Firebug. In early 2006, Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

"Facebook Platform is finally making it easy to share experiences with friends and family over the web, a goal Joe and I have worked toward for years," said Ross. "We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry."

Parakey is Facebook's first acquisition. Financial terms of the transaction were not released.

About Facebook

Founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook helps people better understand the world around them by developing technologies that facilitate the spread of information through social networks. The site has over 31 million registered users in over 47,000 geographic, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks, and according to comScore's MediaMetrix report, Facebook ranks as the sixth-most trafficked site in the United States. Facebook is privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

Facebook(R) is a registered trademark of Facebook Inc. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.