Facebook makes its first acquisition

Facebook, the privately held social networking site crushing Rupert Murdoch's Myspace lately, has made its very first acquisition: Parakey. The terms of the deal were not announced but it seems unlikely that it was too expensive: The site has not even launched yet.

Parakey is the brainchild of Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt who created the hugely popular Mozilla FireFox web browser. The two men have agreed to join Facebook to work on that site. Given the impressive resumes, it seems that the deal was as much about acquiring 2 minds as it was about the Parakey site.

No one's quite sure what will end up happening with Facebook. Tom Taulli has suggested that Facebook may be gearing up for an IPO, while Doug McIntyre wrote about suggestions by a Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) co-founder that the company would remain independent.

As an observer of markets, I'd love to see an IPO, mainly because I'm curious about the public market would value a stand-alone social networking site.