Brinkish

Facebook Teams Up with Mozilla Firefox Dudes

Facebook has made its first acquisition: Parakey, a startup founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox.

Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook immediately to work on the Facebook Platform. These guys were featured in a Rolling Stone article along with Zuckerberg last November.   

Below is a quote from Facebook’s Brandee Barker, brought to you by Justin Smith from Inside Facebook:

“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.”

For the last two years Parakey has been developing a platform that will synchronize your documents and files across web and desktop applications. Ross spoke to IEEE Spectrum last November describing the service as a “Web operating  system.”

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Parakey is Facebook’s first publicly announced acquisition.  Facebook is not releasing financial terms of the transaction.

Source:  Inside Facebook

Facebook is Rolling

New data out from comScore shows Facebook’s growth continuing to accelerate.

• Unique monthly visitors have almost doubled in the last year from 14 million in May 2006 to 26.6 million in May 2007
• Total page views has increased over 140% during the same time period, from 6.5 billion per month in May 2006 to 15.8 billion per month in May 2007
• Most provocatively, average minutes spent on the site per user per month increased 35% over the last year, from 138 in May 2006 to 186 per month in May 2007

Facebook demographics also saw a rise in the young and the old - it’s no longer just the college crowd.

• Visitors aged 12-17 increased 150% over the last year
• Visitors 18-24 increased 38%
• Visitors 25-34 increased 181% during that time - a huge number
• Visitors 35+ increased 98%

By opening its registration beyond college students and companies, Facebook has succeeded in growing the service beyond its founding core of college students and recent alums.  We expect its recent 30% month-to-month growth rate to continue for at least another month or two as Facebook continues to penetrate international markets and older demographics.

Also -- Facebook recently says,

"We asked ourselves the search question more than once while working on improvements to search in March 2006. At the time, there were bigger search engines out there, including some good open source ones, that we could have used to power Facebook search results. However, we decided that searches carried out on Facebook had a particular structure that only we could understand and optimize for. We wrote a crawler for the site, created an in-memory reverse index using both hashes and ternary tries and created a ranking system that scaled to return unique results for over 28 million user profiles.

Some quick stats about Facebook search:

• Over 600 million searches per month. This makes us one of the top 20 search engines on the web in terms of number of searches.
• Approximately 1 terabyte of in-memory data.
• Average search query time of less than 100ms.
• Most used people search engine on the web.

Facebook search results are sorted by an approximation of social graph distance. People closer to you in the graph—your friends and people in your networks—are likely to be more relevant to you and thus are ranked higher. We also use this concept of "social proximity" to order results within applications like groups and events. Facebook search's key differentiator is that search results are unique to every user because they are based on a individual's place in the social graph.

We have big plans to improve Facebook search in the upcoming months. We want to leverage the power of the social graph to further improve the quality of the results and ensure that you find what you are looking for on Facebook."