Palo Alto, California – (Website Hosting Directory) – July 27, 2007 – Social utility portal, Facebook, has acquired Parakey, a startup operated by Co-Founders of Mozilla Firefox, an open-source and non-profit web browser. Parakey is Facebook’s first acquisition. Financial terms of the transaction were not released.

Firefox founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, will join Facebook’s team to work on the development of Facebook Platform and the company’s website.

Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO of Facebook remarked, ”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. The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

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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.

Mr. Ross commented, ”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. We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry.”

Founded in February 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook was developed so that people could better understand the world around them by developing technologies that facilitate the spread of information through social networks. The site has nearly 19 million active users in over 47,000 geographic, work-related, collegiate, and high school networks, and according to ComScore’s MediaMetrix report, Facebook ranks as the sixth-most trafficked site in the United States. Facebook is privately held and headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

To learn more about Facebook, please visit: www.facebook.com.

Tags: Co-Founders, Facebook, Firefox, Garners, Mozilla, Parakey

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