Facebook Acquires Parse To Hasten Mobile App Development

Believe it or not, Facebook is much more than a social network. It's an advertising company, a search company, a discovery company, and increasingly, an engineering company. It's quickly becoming obvious that one of Facebook's biggest strengths is its engineering muscle, and Facebook Home is proof of that. That's a huge, huge effort to fork Android, and while it was no doubt expensive to devote resources to doing it, it could grow the Facebook network tremendously in due time. And now, Facebook's making another investment in engineering by acquiring Parse.


The goal here is to make it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform. Parse is a cloud-based platform that "provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers." According to the Facebook dev team: "By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences."

Facebook seems sure that they aren't going to change Parse, and will "continue offering their products and services." It'll be interesting to see where this takes the world's largest social network on the mobile front. It's obvious that the future of Facebook viewing is on a portable device, so this acquisition is apt to look very smart just a couple of years from now.