Parakey! The Next BIG Thing?

Who's Blake Ross? He's a teenager and the co founder of the Mozilla Firefox project, a spin-off of Netscape’s Mozilla Web browser. The rest is known to almost anyone who loves to browse Safe and Sound along with a few hundred extensions!

I just came across this article on the Next Big Thing by the FireFox Kid as Blake is known popularly. He has named his new pet project - Parakey. That sounds good!

What Parakey is supposed to do is, merge your Online and Offline experiences into one! You heard it right even if you think that sounds familiar. Haven't Google been trying to go near those lines? Well, here there's a difference. The Parakey will have a component that will be installed on your local machine, which will make it a local server accepting and sending out data behind your back! Does that sound scary? Well, it'll definitely sound scary to some people! As Ross puts it - Parakey is a

a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.

That is a very cool idea! While you surf the Internet, a portion of your computer will be visible to the outer world as a webpage containing information about you and whatever you choose. You decide which part of what information is put up there for show. And the coolest part is that Parakey will keep syncing your files (the ones you choose to be synced) behind your back, seamlessly, while you surf the Net. So, in effect, after you have downloaded the photos rom your digital camera, you don't have to upload them explicitly. That will be handled by Parakey!

But coming back to the scary part. What about security? A small exploit could potentially allow an attacker to own your box! For me, the scarier part is that it hasn't been decided which parts of Parakey will be Open Source and which not. The Investors will decide on that!! Damn, that's where I feel a bit uncomfortable.

In terms of Technology, that would aid people in using the Net and one's local computer seamlessly, Parakey has all my support and blessings. But to be very honest, the non-free part of the software would bug me. And one more thing - Parakey was conceived mainly as a commercial idea, not a free community thing as FireFox is. Would that be good for it? Or..

Enjoy the article here and decide for yourself!


Parakey Blake Ross