According to Mashable, Facebook has just acquired Parakey, a startup created by Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. So what is Parakey? According to an article from Spectrum:

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.

This is huge! Facebook may actually be attempting to become the social operating system. The aim is to have seamless integration with your existing system. Parakey sounds eerily similar to Google gears. Facebook is rapidly positioning itself to become Google’s next competitor. The main difference here is that outside developers can already develop applications for the Facebook platform (while it may be limited, they can still develop) whereas Google currently develops all of the applications that sit within the Google productivity suite. If anything was a sign that Facebook doesn’t want to simply sell their company soon, this should be it. Facebook is preparing to take Google (and maybe Microsoft) head on. All I can say is whoa!