Facebook announced its very first acquisition last week with 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.

AJAXWorld Conference & Expo faculty member Dylan Schiemann wrote in his weekend blog entry: "Facebook recently acquired Parakey. Congrats to Joe and Blake, two of the original co-conspirators behind the skunkworks project now known as Firefox. Joe is also known for Firebug, and for his recent work on iUI, a lightweight tool for building simple iPhone apps. While the Facebook platform has become wildly popular for launching web apps based on HTML and Flash, perhaps this announcement will lead to real JavaScript/Ajax support within the Facebook platform."

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