Facebook Buys a Web Celebrity – and His Company - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

More Facebook/Parakey info from NYT BITS 

But according to an article last year in IEEE Spectrum, the company was designing a system to synchronize user’s data between their computer desktop and the Web:

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. …. 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.

So how does this mesh with Facebook’s social network? At the company’s Platform launch earlier this year, it was clear founder Mark Zuckerberg had ambitious aspirations to turn Facebook into an operating system on the Internet—an online platform on which other software applications could run, and where computer users would spend the bulk of their online time.

Hmm -- so now we have a few potential solutions for the pesky desktop/cloud sync challenge

• Firefox 3.x
• Google Gears
• Adobe AIR
• Whatever the Parakey guys (who were instrumental in creating Firefox) have been working on

Facebook Buys a Web Celebrity – and His Company - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog