The second most popular social-networking site, the Palo Alto-based Facebook, announced its first acquisition. Parakey is a start-up run Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Firefox and their product was described as a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

“Parakey is a platform for building applications that merge the best of the desktop and the Web. Like desktop applications, these applications work offline, offer more privacy than pure websites, run quickly, and integrate with your computer and its devices. But like Web applications, they are also more creative, visually alluring, accessible from anywhere and potentially accessible by anyone.” it states the Parakey’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." The financial terms of deal were not disclosed.

Under the terms of agreement, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt will continue their work at Facebook headquarter.

In May this year at F8 conference, Facebook announced Facebook Platform, a new development platform that enables companies and engineers to integrate with the Facebook website and gain access to millions of users.

Facebook was originally targeted for college students but since expanded to other age groups, now has 24 million users and is growing at a faster clip than MySpace.