Facebook buys Parakey

Social networking site Facebook has bought internet start-up, Parakey, run by two of the co-creators of the popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox.

This is an interesting happening. Most notably since it involves the Mozilla Firefox founders. We already know that these two guys are trailblazers of innovation with the success of Firefox.

If they are going to put their minds to developing a a web based OS It will most likely be a huge success.

"Parakey is described as a platform that "bridges the gap between information on the web and the desktop".

As part of the deal, which is for an undisclosed sum, Mozilla Firefox founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt will help to develop the Facebook site.

A notice on Parakey's site says it hopes to makes consumers' lives easier.

"Computers are frustrating," the site says. "Creating documents, finding files, sharing information - why do everyday things still seem so tedious and counterintuitive?"

"Give your computer the bird," it concludes."

The Power of Google Gears

There has been a lot of talk about Google's new development environment "GOOGLE GEARS". This article is a good summary of how Google Gears works and how powerful it will soon be.

The article starts out by stating:

"Web application development is the perfect 95 percent solution. It's very easy to develop a simple HTML frontend to something like PHP or Rails, to deliver data to and from a MySQL database. You can even give it a more desktop feel by using Ajax tools. But that last five percent, the ability for desktop applications to work offline, was missing from the web world until the release of Google Gears."

Indeed...as powerful as web applications have gotten the ability to use them while disconected from the internet has been a big drawback.

It has also been a road block for web apps to compete against windows based applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

As developers begin to integrate Google Gears into their web applications we will see the use of these applications sky rocket.

Offline Browsing on a Mobile Device

According to this article there is a new web browser for the Palm OS that allows caching of web pages while browsing with your handheld (Palm Treo 650, 680, and 700 p).

The web browser is called Xiino from a company called Mobirus.

This is a nifty feature especially since the handhelds of today are providing more and more storage on board...especially with the addition of an SD card.

This will allow you to cache frequently used data from websites such as directions, movie times, etc without having to rely on having a data connection the next time you want to use them.

However, on the negative side there are some major bugs with the browser.

The author writes:
..."unfortunately, I quickly spotted some ugly bugs: it doesn’t seem to interpret UTF8 pages properly, it doesn’t support the application/xhtml+xml media type (!), doesn’t follow anchors marked with id="foo" (which I guess can be summarized as not supporting properly XHTML), and seems to have a pretty limited support for CSS as well."

But hopefully these issues will be fixed in the future.