Comments:"Why Facebook made a smart buy with Parse"
David Paul Morris
Facebook made a smart purchase with Parse, one that will likely compliment Facebook Home in its bid to be a major player in mobile.
Today Facebook announced another acquisition: Parse, a backend service provider for mobile app developers. Since the blog post announcing it says Facebook is not closing down the service, and in actuality won't be doing anything at all to change Parse in the near term, this looks to be an actual, honest-to-god service acquisition, and not an acquihire for the engineering talent as has become so common in the Valley of late.
No purchase price has been disclosed, so it's hard to say whether they overpaid. But it does seem like a really smart buy because it gives Facebook another tool to work at the industry that will either make it or kill it — mobile.
Simply put, mobile is the future, and Facebook is having to readjust its plans to be the social layer connecting everything to account for how it's different from the web. On the web, Facebook is probably most users' homepage, the service they use to sign in to other websites, the one they keep open constantly in a browser tab, and the one they refresh constantly.
On mobile, they're just one app among many, and most of those apps aren't passing them any data. That puts Facebook at a disadvantage against competitors like Google, Amazon and Apple, who already control the operating systems those apps are running on and the commerce platforms through which people are buying them.
Facebook Home was a first stab at solving that problem by moving the Facebook experience into the OS. Rather than being confined to a single app, it would be a layer wrapping all the apps in a thin, treacly layer of social. That approach has met with mixed success — Facebook Home hasn't moved above No. 50 in the Google Play store since it debuted to much fanfare, and it's currently sitting at only a 2.2 rating thanks to many 1 star reviews.
Parse potentially gives another avenue into mobile because as a backend service that lets developers work things like data storage, logins, push notifications and social features into their apps without having to pay for hardware infrastructure to support them, it provides Facebook a way to start integrating its services into other apps at a very basic level. Even if it doesn't take over the OS, as long as it can ensure it's an integral part of a lot of different apps, it will still be getting the user data it needs to deliver personalized advertising and content to those users and monetize.
It's a smart play. If Facebook Home doesn't let it go in through the front, then Facebook will find a way in through the backend.
Jon Xavier is Web Producer at the Business Journal. His phone number is 408.299.1826.