
Facebook buys Parse - uptown
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse/
======
cletus
This doesn't surprise me in that it seems like a natural fit for Facebook, who
has a Mobile Problem [tm].

As much as people fear Facebook becoming The Internet (in the AOL sense),
Facebook is actually really late to this party.

Apple has a mobile OS, a content and payments ecosystem and a deeply
integrated set of products.

Google has a mobile OS, GMail, a search engine, a burgeoning content ecosystem
and its Maps/local properties.

Amazon has a content and payments ecosystem, a limited mobile presence (Kindle
Fires basically, which are of course tablets not phones) and cloud
infrastructure.

All of these things are (IMHO) pieces in technology's future. Facebook really
is a one trick pony (although an 8000 pound pony if you want to stretch the
metaphor).

It's why you saw them panic about Instagram (if a ~2 year old company with 13
employees is an existential threat then your position is, by definition,
precarious).

It's why rumours of a Facebook Phone have circulated for a year or two (eg
Project Spartan) and why Facebook launched Facebook Home. It's trying to get
the benefits of having a mobile OS without actually developing one and
building market share (ask Microsoft how hard that is).

Facebook's strength really is being a closed silo/platform for The Internet
(or a version of it at least). So buying Parse makes perfect sense as they
want to extend the reach and power of the Facebook platform.

Congrats to the Parse guys.

Disclaimer: I am an engineer for Google.

~~~
Apocryphon
Ironic that Google seems to have a social networking problem, while Facebook
has a mobile problem.

~~~
jacquesm
If google keeps ramming their social network product down peoples throats it
won't be very long before they have more than just a social networking
problem.

~~~
voidlogic
As a user my G+ experience is so far superior to my Facebook one that I laugh
every time I read something like this. I check my G+ every day because my
streams are interesting and I enjoy it; I check my FB everyday because my
entire extended family, pre-school friends and their dogs have accounts there.

People are crazy to think that Google should not just have one account that
spans all their services, it makes business and technical sense; however, if
you don't like G+ just don't use it- your Google account just might mean you
have a blank place holder page there.

~~~
jacquesm
I don't use facebook either. So G+ is far inferior because at least I can get
facebook out of my life.

~~~
psbp
Do you just not like the name? As voidlogic points out, it's basically a
generic account for Google services. There's a potential to engage socially,
but you don't have to.

~~~
jacquesm
I'm pretty hard to fool.

~~~
saraid216
No, you're just hard to please. There's a difference.

~~~
reaclmbs
He is a C programmer.

------
oneplusone
Damn. I was going to use Parse for my app, but now I will not. What are some
of the alternatives out there?

~~~
dweekly
Bummer. Can I ask why this changed your mind? At FB, we're quite serious about
finding ways to gift third party developers with APIs, tools, open source,
platforms, whatever we can do to help. I think Parse is pretty awesome and is
likely to become more so at Facebook. That's a useless opinion if it's not
shared by the wider community, though.

So: feedback taken seriously - we're listening. Fire away.

~~~
newhouseb
> gift third party developers with APIs...

Phrasing like this concerns me. When making platform decisions, I would very
much like greater assurance that there is an expectation of how a relationship
matures than you would find in a "gifting" scenario. I feel like sometimes the
attitude from Facebook has been "We're giving all of this stuff away for free!
What is there to complain about?" Free means no expectation of warranty and
zero assumed reliability.

I don't really even care about free. If you're running a real startup, you pay
for things, and I would gladly pay for Facebook API usage if it meant that
Facebook took their APIs a little more seriously (I could talk at great length
about all the subtleties in Facebook's APIs that require us to duplicate
insane amounts of work that Facebook could _easily_ take care of). Amazon is
clearly the best at this with AWS (especially in preemptively coming up with
new services it turns out everyone was building piecemeal anyway), I would
look at Amazon's APIs and try to port the some good insights to the Graph API.

~~~
randartie
I think the word gift and give in this context are interchangeable. Sounds
like you found a word to pick at and are now just hating Facebook for the sake
of it. (You managed to extrapolate that Facebook has 0 assumed reliability
because he used the word gift.)

~~~
newhouseb
Quite the contrary, I think Facebook is great and is only getting better. But
as someone who builds a lot of stuff on their APIs I can say it's easily the
shakiest component of our architecture.

------
pxlpshr
Congrats to the Parse team!!

As a customer, not necessarily happy about this. I don't like Doug Purdy's
quote, "We don’t _intend_ to change this." We use Parse and love it. I really
hope they maintain some autonomy as to not get sucked into the "move fast and
break things" or "documentation? f--k it." Nonetheless, probably makes a lot
of sense for Facebook's mobile strategy.

~~~
csmajorfive
Our focus on quality in product and documentation got us to this point so
we're not going to change that strategy anytime soon :-)

~~~
bitcartel
What did your revenues look like?

This acquisition doesn't really tell us if Parse, based around a proprietary
SDK, had a viable business model or not.

~~~
csmajorfive
I can't share revenue numbers but we picked this route over multiple Series B
term sheets. So, that's a measure of viability.

------
csmajorfive
Shout out to HN favorite grellas for being our counsel.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas>

~~~
grellas
Thanks, Ilya - amazing outcome and richly deserved. A wonderful group of
founders and a supportive and first-class group of investors.

~~~
jacquesm
Now there is a good combination :)

Congratulations to all of you!

------
aashaykumar92
It's nice to see Facebook is aware of the areas which it lacks in. Just
recently (in the last couple of days), there was an article clearly saying how
mobile developers are in fact turning away from Facebook, for a variety of
reasons. Acquiring Parse is not only demonstrating acknowledgment of this
problem, but also providing a potential solution and way to tackle the
problem.

Congratulations to the Parse team and good luck in helping to bring more
developers to Facebook's platform! Given Parse's success so far, I don't see
how or why Facebook shouldn't benefit from this acquisition.

------
tsurantino
Could this mean that Facebook is positioning itself as the AWS (in a very
metaphoric sense) for mobile and expanding opportunities for the Facebook kapp
ecosystem?

I understand that this is a new revenue stream for the company but I've never
really seen the Facebook apps platform spawn "fully-fledged" apps other than
those that boasted some form of basic Facebook integration. On the desktop at
least, a Facebook app has always existed as a second-class citizen, being on a
separate page that is segregated from the rest of the Facebook experience. Of
course, you can argue that News Feed integration is one way to mitigate that,
but from what I've seen, such integration is sparse and jarring - serving as
an ad for the application that people on Facebook see.

------
abijlani
I'm a big fan of Parse even though I prefer Firebase as a developer. This is
sad news because I think they were one company that was executing really well
and would have been successful on their own. Even though Facebook and Parse
say they are not going to shutdown the service we all know how that story
goes.

~~~
csmajorfive
They may not be the majority but there are acquisitions where a service keeps
running. This is one of them.

~~~
youngerdryas
Parse is awesome, and you may be right, but for me being owned by Facebook is
a deal breaker.

------
fizzbar
Interesting that Ilya doesn't seem to apprehend why so many people are uneasy
about this.

~~~
csmajorfive
I apprehend it and it's an important issue to address. So, I'm addressing it.

~~~
swombat
You're not addressing it, you're just making reassuring noises. Addressing it
would involve explaining why Facebook actually bought Parse and how it fits in
their overall strategy. There are many reasons, both honest and dishonest, why
you may not be able to explain that, but until you do, you're not addressing
the issue.

Which is fine by me - I don't have any eggs in this basket - but the pedant in
me needed to point this out. If you want to have a chance to dispel all the
doubts, start by answering the above clearly and with no overly enthusiastic
exaggerations à la "Facebook is awesome and Parse is so great" and so on...

~~~
avichal
It's really not that hard to understand why Facebook "actually" bought Parse.
Parse has a great product that developers like to use. Facebook has a platform
and that requires making users and developers happy. Buying a product that
makes developers happy and making it a part of Facebook's platform is a pretty
straightforward strategy.

~~~
swombat
That's an incorrect explanation.

 _Facebook has a platform and that requires making users and developers
happy._

No, Facebook has a platform that requires extracting as much personal data
from people as possible in order to sell ads to advertisers. The developer
platform, apps, etc, are all subordinate to this objective. There's no
business model for Facebook to "make people happy". It is absolutely an
advertising company, and Parse is/was not. So, the question remains, how does
Parse fit into Facebook's advertising-driven business model?

~~~
avichal
That is a pretty big misunderstanding of how Facebook operates. If Facebook
put advertisers ahead of users, it would not be at 1B users and it would not
have been around for 8 years, and dominant for many of those years. The
business model is primarily to make people happy to make sure to have their
attention, and secondarily to sell ads against this attention.

I've worked at Amazon, Google, and Facebook. The core characteristic of each
of these companies is that they are all ruthlessly focused on their primary
customer as the user, not as the retailer or the advertiser. And it is for
this reason that they get to massive scale and become dominant. If you don't
get this, then you won't understand why Parse is a clear fit.

~~~
swombat
Ah, that ruthless focus on keeping the users and the developer community happy
must be why Google killed Reader and will probably kill Feedburner soon, and
why so many great products got acquired and then killed by their new owners a
few years later.

You're right that if you believe what you just declared, then Parse's future
at Facebook seems reasonable. You're also right that we won't convince each
other of our views on this, so I guess time will tell whether Parse continues
to thrive or gets shitcanned in a few years.

------
khangtoh
Apple should have just acquired Parse. iCloud is a mess, it's a next step for
them to provide some sort of back end API for iOS developers. They're sitting
on a huge pile of cash and all Tim could come up with is stock buyback.

~~~
zw
While I agree that there needs to be a "fix" (and I have to assume one is in
the works), but taking the Microsoft route of throwing money at problems until
they work put them into the position they are today.

------
mseebach
I'm not a mobile developer, which is probably why I struggle to see what Parse
does? What does Parse give me (if I was a mobile dev) that I don't get from
Heroku+libs? Are push notifications and identity so painful to deal with that
there's a business in creating a full platform to deal with it?

~~~
rdouble
_Are push notifications and identity so painful to deal with that there's a
business in creating a full platform to deal with it?_

Yes. (at least on iOS, not sure about Android or Win)

Parse has an iOS data object that syncs properly, whereas there is no evidence
that any developer has ever gotten Apple's own iCloud + Core Data to sync
properly at the record level.

Parse is cross platform so you can easily get the same data for a user on a
desktop, web, android, iOS and windows mobile app.

Cobbling all this together with Heroku + libs would be possible but would
require a lot of work. Parse just works out of the box.

~~~
pifflesnort
> _Yes. (at least on iOS, not sure about Android or Win)_

er, what? It's an afternoon's worth of work, involving basic PKI and TCP
sockets. I know it's an afternoon's worth of work, because I've done it in an
afternoon.

~~~
jkubicek
That's silly. Seeing as how I had to google PKI to see what it was, I doubt
I'd be able to build a Parse-like service in one afternoon. Parse may not be
strictly necessary, but it's a fantastically easy and cheap way for iOS (and
Android and front-end and Windows Phone) developers to get their backend up
and running.

~~~
pifflesnort
> _Seeing as how I had to google PKI to see what it was, I doubt I'd be able
> to build a Parse-like service in one afternoon._

Then it's something you would learn, and those several afternoons would mean
that you'd be well equipped to tackle a similar problem in an afternoon later.

Basic x509 certificates and PKI is really something an iOS developer (or any
developer, really) should be able handle. Understanding this stuff is pretty
central to just about all secure communications we have between
clients/servers _anywhere_. It's not like you have to reimplement a crypto
library; you just need to know the basics of how they work.

------
drusenko
Congrats guy, you all deserved it. Awesome team, lots of hard work, and it
sounds like Facebook will be a great home.

------
davidkatz
Parse is handling 10 million requests for our app per month, and I'm very
uneasy about this.

~~~
csmajorfive
Why? Email me - ilya@parse.com

~~~
jonknee
Is it really not obvious? Parse doesn't overlap with Facebook's core goals and
that frequently means somewhere down the road "business as usual" means "you
have 60 days to GTFO". There's also not wanting Facebook to have access to
your data or just plain not wanting to do business with Facebook (I fall under
that category, a FB buyout or partnership is the fastest way to get me to stop
using a service).

------
fizx
Here's my speculation: Facebook bought Parse to attempt to own mobile usage
data. Draw parallels with what Google did when they bought Urchin to form
Google Analytics. I don't think Facebook cares about creating developer
experiences. I think they care about having tracking hooks into mobile
applications.

~~~
csmajorfive
That's incorrect.

~~~
WayneDB
Why? Makes sense to me. Why else would Facebook want to "power my app" with
Parse?

Haven't they always only offered developer services for their own platform and
not the wider web?

~~~
mhartl
The person who wrote "That's incorrect" is a Parse founder
(<https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=csmajorfive>).

~~~
pifflesnort
Does that make his statement more or less likely to be accurate?

~~~
donohoe
More likely to be accurate.

If the original statement had a nugget of truth it would be easiest to just
ignore it and not answer. Instead, they are going on the record and saying its
not true.

~~~
pifflesnort
> _Instead, they are going on the record and saying its not true._

It's not like "going on record" means anything; truth is an oddly malleable
thing. What's true today might not be tomorrow, what is said to be true may
only be what the speaker _needs_ you to believe is true, or it may be the
speaker only _believes_ it to be true.

The best predictor of what's to come is past experience and objective
observation, not the words of people who have both incentive and ego wrapped
up in propagating a particular narrative.

[edit] From another comment, here's an e-mail from the Parse team, from
1/15/2013 -- only 3 months ago:

"Being acquired isn't part of our game plan for now. We want to build a viable
business that people can use and enjoy. We have 50k apps built on our
infrastructure and a huge customer base that is growing rapidly. Everyday we
have more and more Basic, Pro, and Enterprise users paying us for our awesome
services."

<https://gist.github.com/brianpattison/5463282>

When you're dealing with venture capitalists, the truth is whatever they need
the audience to believe.

------
namuol
_/me immediately downloads dumps of all his app's data._

But seriously, what will this mean for my user data? Privacy, portability,
etc.

What alternatives are there that compare in quality? Don't tell me HeliOS,
because that's iOS-only (I use Parse for it's web apps mostly).

~~~
csmajorfive
We're not changing anything. We're not going to suddenly lock in your data,
share it somewhere you don't want it to be shared, or anything like that.

~~~
jonknee
No one gets married with a divorce planned, but divorces aren't exactly
uncommon. This quote from Zuck comes to mind:

> "We have not once bought a company for the company. We buy companies to get
> excellent people."

As do a few acquisitions followed by shut-downs: Drop.io, Face.com ($100M!),
Gowalla, etc.

------
corylehey
And I was having such a great day until I read this. R.I.P. Parse

~~~
jamesgpearce
Why? No plans to let it rest.

~~~
modarts
I'm sure that's not Ilya and team's plan; but the issue is that they no longer
have ownership of their "plan".

I'm struggling to see how this isn't blatantly obvious to a lot of commenters
here.

------
6thSigma
As a Parse user I had hoped they would be a "never sell" type of company. This
news saddens me.

We will likely be migrating off soon.

~~~
merlinsbrain
As someone who was just about to use Parse, what options are you looking at?

~~~
estel
See the replies here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5609898>

------
julianpye
I hope the platform can stay as independent as it is. I just recently won a
Google arranged hackathon in Munich (and through it a fully paid trip and
tickets to I/O - yay!) and it would have been totally impossible to do this
without parse. A few lines of code and I was able to setup a complex messaging
system between a native Android app and a server visualisation. It sets you
free from so many worries and really makes any mobile app that talks to a
server so much easier to develop. It's the single most useful service I have
ever used in this space.

------
BillySquid
Good news for the Parse team, but not so good for Parse users.

~~~
csmajorfive
Why? We're not going anywhere. Email me if you want to chat - ilya@parse.com

~~~
redrocket
For the love of code, please place a 'delete account' option within your gui.

------
mamatta
Everyone wants a piece of mobile dev tools. Think Twitter + Crashlytics and
now Facebook + Parse. As some might remember, Facebook at one point only had
Heroku as their core Dev partner [1], so it only makes sense for Facebook to
get in this space.

[1] <https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/558/>

------
txttran
Does $85M seem really cheap to anyone else?

~~~
jsnell
No? From what I can see they've taken less than a 10th of that in VC. And this
is the first time in over a year that I've heard anything about them. Buzz
isn't everything, and maybe there was a viable business there. But they
certainly weren't setting the world on fire.

It's pretty hard to see how a near $100 million exit in circumstances like
that would be disappointing or "really cheap". (And congrats certainly seem in
order for everyone involved).

~~~
pg
_But they certainly weren't setting the world on fire._

Actually their growth was _very_ good, among the steepest of all the 500 or so
companies we've funded.

~~~
jsnell
That's great to hear. But since pretty much nobody here has access to those
awespme internals, I still don't see where the gp's "really cheap" impression
would be coming from.

~~~
sarbogast
When you have used the technology and seen with your own eyes the amount of
time and effort it saves you when developing a mobile app, $85M really seems
very cheap, especially when you compare it to how much they paid for an
Instagram for example. Plus it should be mentioned that although their primary
focus was on mobile platform, their SDK's also support Windows desktop,
MacOSX, and traditional web dev. The potential is absolutely huge.

------
zan2434
Whoa. This is pretty big news. This + Piecable + Facebook's huge push in
mobile development recently = Facebook building a new, simpler development
platform/environment for mobile apps? This speculation can be taken pretty
far.

~~~
apalmer
Facebooks problem is a fundamental development culture one, 'move fast and
break things' is not great from the perspective of developers latching onto
your platform. If the reward is great enough, yes its worth it...

~~~
jamesgpearce
Working on improving these things! Indeed we hope this deal demonstrates that.

------
techbubble
Dammit...was just about to start using Parse on two major projects after a
fair bit of testing. Back to square one it is.

------
gailees
Parse is an amazing product. Facebook just killed it on this acquisition if
they can find a way to leverage Parse's ability to provide quicker deployment
and their position as a great platform for rapid distribution.

------
DrinkWater
Seriously disappointed. Many (me included) will fear that a brilliant product
like Parse will be abused to reheat the future outlook on Facebook.

I hope the product itself will stay as independent as possible (very
unlikely).

------
stephen
And here I thought there wasn't any money in dev tools...

------
joeybaggles
Well this is not the future I was hoping for with Parse and our apps. What to
do, what to do...

------
jedc
Congrats to the team for being the third-biggest exit to date of a company to
come from a seed accelerator. <http://www.seed-
db.com/companies/funding?value=exit>

[edited; originally said FB bought OMGPOP but it was Zynga. Sorry I was wrong,
it's past midnight here]

Looks like they're making Ignition Partners happy... I'd guess around a 4x
return. But making a lot of other angels/funds happy, too. (Garry Tan, Google
Ventures, David Rusenko amongst others). Details here: <http://www.seed-
db.com/companies/view?companyid=102025>

~~~
kul
I thought Zynga bought OMGPOP?

------
grigy
I just started to build my app on Parse. Now I want to migrate. What are the
alternatives?

------
icodestuff
Congrats, Parse guys. Please try not to let Facebook ruin an awesome service.

~~~
chrisblizzard
We heart them and their services. They aren't going anywhere.

------
cpher
It's weird... Last night I had a completely "arbitrary" dream about this
company. Like, my <insert fake company name here> company was struggling with
payments and this company was in my dream.

I'll acknowledge that I've been using CPAP for over a year and now can
actually remember my dreams (_shudder_) because I sleep so well, and I don't
actually use this service, but for some reason my dreams were very vivid. I'm
not even sure why they might be relevant to me right now. Maybe I read too
much HN before bed... ;)

------
gridmaths
If you could have invented Parse.. you would have invented Parse

------
jmacduff
Congrats to the Parse team, great product and team.

(from the buddy.com team)

------
macarthy12
28 days ago I said : Expect Parse to be bought soon.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5454779>

~~~
dmcy22
Nice. What caused you to think that then?

------
juanbyrge
Lol that's a lot of money to pay for a mongodb instance

~~~
csmajorfive
lol

~~~
onedev
lol

------
aespinoza
Congrats to the Parse team. I am a bit bummed. I was very happy to compete
with them. Hopefully the founders stay and keep bringing it on.

~~~
csmajorfive
We're staying.

~~~
aespinoza
Cool! See you guys in the trenches.

------
mtitus16
That was fast <https://www.stackmob.com/parse/>

------
modarts
This is really disheartening. I'm glad that I only build a POC on top of Parse
before fully diving in.

Any recommendations for comparable services (something with a decent
javascript api would be nice; i'm not doing a whole lot with native mobile)

------
sinzone
Soon FB will monetize most of their APIs too. Example: Real-time access to all
its social stream is going to be a paid usage API.

~~~
mcintyre1994
I'd rather see that approach than a no entry, shut down developers approach.
Admittedly Facebook offers a lot more than Twitter to justify such a cost, but
Twitter seems like somewhere developers want to be too. Paid usage API sounds
like a good idea to me.

------
mcs
So surges of facebook apps will have data with default ACLs set to everyone?

------
jpatel3
Congrats to Parse folks!

------
afinlayson
Congrats!

------
youngerdryas
That really sucks. I mean it is great for the Parse team but I trust Facebook
as far as I can throw Zuckerberg.

