Parakey, the mysterious startup that Blake Ross (creator of Firefox) had been working on, was acquired by Facebook on Thursday. This is a very interesting development that gives us a glimpse into the product of Parakey and the vision of Facebook.
Parakey, as far as we know, was to be some sort of in-browser operating system, the true sky-computing. Sky -- in the opposite sense of having windows on your computer right now. Your files and applications are all stored online. Facebook seems to be headed this way as well with their "Social Networking OS" in the form of opening up their APIs to developers for creating "applets."
There's so much potential with this "cloud OS," because increasing mobility is where everyone is headed.
Data transfer rates through Edge, WiMax, EVDO, and direct from the telecoms all are increasing and there's a coming convergence with the mobile phone and the laptop. We can see both sides taking a step toward each other; from the mobile phone stemmed the Blackberries and the Palm Treos and from the laptop, come the OQOs and the UMPCs. The UMPCs were arguably rather silly products, but imagine if storage were not a concern, then all of a sudden you eliminate the need for hard drives on the devices, then processing power can be decreased and therefore the chipsets can then be smaller.
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