Facebook buys Parse

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/facebook-parse/

by uptown • 13 years ago

511 268 13 years ago

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.

pxlpshr• 13 years ago

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.

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

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

pifflesnort7• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, intentions about how you'll operate after an acquisition are just wishes.

There's a huge corporate political apparatus that just paid a lot of money for the right to implant their thumb print on how you do things. You may be able to push that day forward, but unless you wind up in charge, there's not much long-term hope.

Congratulations on the acquisition, but sorry about the acquisition.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years ago

You might believe that, but the question is: will you have a choice?

bitcartel• 13 years ago

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.

evan_• 13 years ago

You no longer control your own destiny, you will do what Facebook tells you to do :-)

jamesgpearce3• 13 years ago

This is a big & exciting step forwards for Facebook and what we can offer developers.

(And we're working hard on all your concerns too...)

chrisblizzard3• 13 years ago

It means what it says. It's not going to change. This is about product as much as talent and is an important piece that we want mobile developers to have access to.

disclaimer: I work at Facebook.

oneplusone2• 13 years ago

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

aespinoza4• 13 years ago

Check us out: http://iknode.com

cgshaw• 13 years ago

Check out Kinvey — http://www.kinvey.com/

markerdmann• 13 years ago

http://helios.io/ is an open-source backend framework.

namuol3• 13 years ago

(iOS only)

bennyg• 13 years ago

Looks sweet, thanks for the recommendation. Whenever I get a box I'll look into using this for Push services.

jchrisa• 13 years ago

https://github.com/couchbase/mobile json database sync

DanielRibeiro• 13 years ago

Stackmob[1] and Urban Airship[2], depending on what you'd use it for

[1] https://www.stackmob.com/

[2] http://urbanairship.com/

crabasa• 13 years ago

Cloudmine - https://cloudmine.me

Azure Mobile Services - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/

tartuffe78• 13 years ago

No offense, but suggesting Microsoft to a guy who is turned off by Facebook made me chuckle

Maarten88• 13 years ago

Azure Mobile Services - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/

rmason• 13 years ago

http://www.firebase.com and https://www.backlift.com/index.html

danielsiders• 13 years ago

Tent (https://tent.io)

SidneyAllen• 13 years ago

Check out http://www.stackmob.com

Open Source SDKs iOS SDK built with Core Data Great developer community and support

romain_dardour• 13 years ago

http://hull.io - social platform as a service

akurilin• 13 years ago

http://buddy.com/

Options are truly abundant in this space.

benatkin3• 13 years ago

There's UserGrid, which is open source: https://developers.apigee.com/app-services

ing33k• 13 years ago

This ones pretty cool, but documentation doesn’t really catchup with that others. but do check it out..

idea_shot• 13 years ago

There's a comprehensive list of BaaS providers here -> http://www.kinvey.com/backend-as-a-service

benatkin3• 13 years ago

That chart is quite entertaining. Too complex to be accurate but very informative.

namuol3• 13 years ago

http://deployd.com/

dweekly5• 13 years ago

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.

monkeyspaw• 13 years ago

As someone in a similar situation: I don't like tie ins with huge companies. My experience with the Facebook API has been horrible in the past (constantly changing, poor documentation).

In short, I don't want FB/Goog/Apple/etc. to keep buying up the independent operators that I know and love. In a similar way, I prefer to frequent my local coffee shack over a Starbucks. Nothing Starbucks could do would really change my mind.

There's not really anything facebook could do other than not being facebook. Sorry.

dudurocha• 13 years ago

I think he is worried, thinking facebook may kill Parse, and he will have no support.

zacaltman• 13 years ago

First off, Parse is awesome and I love it!

I have the same concerns (although I already have apps using Parse in the wild!): • Will FB kill off Parse? Seems quite unlikely in the short term, but in the long term? • Are they going to try and force any integrations with FB? • Will Parse continue to improve (they've done a lot of this recently!) or will it dwindle as others move faster? • Data / Privacy - what's going to happen with those going forward? These always are a concern in people's minds when FB comes up. • Facebook's APIs / Developer Support is SHIT... will this happen to Parse too?

benbritten• 13 years ago

I am in a similar position. Was about a week away from pulling the trigger on parse after a lot of research into the backend service providers. Now I will definitely look elsewhere. One problem is that FB APIs have a tendency to be constantly changing, and the documentation is not good. This shifting sands is not a good place to build a service.

However, the biggest reason is that FB is NOT a back end service provider. Facebook's customer is the advertisers. Before getting bought, Parse's customer were the companies that used their service. Now Parse is part of FB so future directions will all be in service of FB's main customer, the advertisers. I have no problem with this from a business standpoint, I am sure it is a good move for FB, but as a customer of back end cloud services I want to be purchasing that service from a company that puts me first. FB will not do that.

TL;DR: I was Parse's customer, I am not Facebook's customer.

oneplusone2• 13 years ago

My issues:

- I don't trust Facebook to not convert the user system into a Facebook connect monster and force it on me - I don't trust Facebook to not data mine my data and violate me and my user's privacy - I don't trust Facebook to let me export my data once I want to move on - I don't trust Facebook to actually delete data once I tell them to do so - I don't trust Facebook to not to attempt to monetize my users beyond the account fee that I pay

luchak• 13 years ago

What would worry me is that I don't understand what Facebook really wants out of this acquisition, and why this will motivate it to do right by Parse users. It looks to me like a number of other people in this thread don't understand either and are coming up with their own theories, few of which are good news for the developer.

burningion3• 13 years ago

So the Parse platform allowed me to get and implement my iOS app in under a month, getting my MVP out there. If you want to really assure users that they can be comfortable, and to not flee, make it so we have access to our user's password hashes.

Before, the Parse team said they were thinking of implementing it, but now there's no contest. Either you guys allow me to take my user data, or we're done, and I'm completely separating from you guys, and wouldn't recommend anyone building on the platform.

So, let me have ALL access to my user's data, and we can keep hanging. Otherwise, we're done.

As it is, I'm making plans already to move, on the assumption you guys won't let me get my user's data.

teyc• 13 years ago

Parse is a distraction for FB. You are not even in the same business. Regardless of what you say, you are unable to override the CEO if or when he decides that Parse is to be shut down. The alternatives are more appealing because their business model solely depends on customers paying for the back end service.

The best thing FB can do is to bind itself legally to continue to run Parse for the next x number of years.

If FB wants to dabble with PaaS, businesses are going to assess Parse on the basis that it is only an experiment. Tying oneself to a back end is like marriage. No one will invest in a relationship if the other side is only half serious.

e28eta• 13 years ago

Our team uses Pieceable, which Facebook also purchased, and which I would also consider a tool for third party mobile developers.

The acquisition announcement [1] states that Pieceable is/was going to be killed 12/31/12, but prior to that date they'd open source it. And, as far as I can tell, that's the last time anything has been said about the product. I don't even know if you're still taking our money, but it's going to suck when you turn it off or it breaks due to obsolescence.

So, my answer is that your prior behavior does not instill confidence.

[1] https://www.pieceable.com/facebook

epaga2• 13 years ago

I'm in the same boat - was planning on using Parse and no longer think I will. Core issue: complete lack of trust that Facebook won't screw things up as they have so many times in the past (frequent breaking changes to their API, etc.).

Also, complete lack of trust in Facebook due to their lack of understanding of the need for privacy as opposed to pseudo-social ... "stuff".

newhouseb2• 13 years ago

> 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.

sarbogast3• 13 years ago

I've been using Parse with great pleasure as well for a couple of months and I really want to keep using it because their API is really beautiful and their design is absolutely gorgeous. But the past event that worries me is the acquisition of face.com. Right after the acquisition, they assured everyone it would stay up and they would continue to support it for all the developers who integrated its facial recognition API into their apps. And just a couple of months later, they announced they would fully absorb and kill it as an independent service. Today, the domain doesn't even lead anywhere. Now I know that the scope and impact of Face.com were way less than those of Parse, but still, you can't blame us for worrying.

One thing that would personally reassure me would be for Facebook to add a "non-hosted" offering to Parse, which means the ability to download Parse's application and install it on my own server. If this was available I would keep using Parse as a hosted service knowing that in the event that Facebook decides to shut it down at some point, I can export all my data and have it running on my own infrastructure.

skrebbel2• 13 years ago

Users of apps based on Parse used to just be users, now they're Facebook users. Combine the fact that a core part of Parse is storing user data, and Facebook's track record of treating such data, I think you should be able to figure the rest out yourself.

If I'm going to pay a firm to store data for me, I need to completely trust that that firm is going to treat said data with silk gloves. I choose what's done with it, not my backend storage partner.

I'm going to be very surprised if the Facebook make-a-detailed-profile-of-every-person-on-the-planet department is going to keep their hands off of Parse data for the next 3 years.

jjsz• 13 years ago

There's backlift [https://www.backlift.com/] that connects to Dropbox.

buzzrecords2• 13 years ago

Buddy.com; StackMob; Kinvey; Appcelerator Cloud, etc...

There's a bunch out there. Buddy has advanced analytics, Kinvey charges by the user (vs. by APIs), StackMob basically runs an affiliate model upselling companion services.

malandrew• 13 years ago

StackMob I think is in this space as well.

Kiro2• 13 years ago

Just use Parse. What's the problem?

gimenete• 13 years ago

In my company we are developing http://backbeam.io/

It is still in beta but just for a couple of weeks. In general it is similar to parse.com but it has also heavy support for developing web applications hosted on backbeam (optinally with custom domain). It also has a more powerful query language, a real-time API and great support to manipulate files (you can escale images in different ways just by changing parameters in a URL).

Each project has two environments and you can browse the databases visually taking special care of relationships between entities.

The website is being redesigned and the documentation is work in progress.

This is an example of a complex query to the database:

select('news').query('join author join last 5 comments having score > ? fetch author', min_score)

We are open to comments and suggestions :)

sarbogast3• 13 years ago

Funny how StackMob quickly put together a migration page: https://developer.stackmob.com/parse/migration

seansmith232• 13 years ago

We had been getting lots of requests for a migration tool prior to the announcement.

mattyc• 13 years ago

If you're an enterprise developer, AnyPresence is a great option. Hands down the best MBaaS for enterprise, and the ONLY solution that won't lock you in (i.e., you own not just the data, but also the run-time components (code, server, etc). Check them out - http://www.anypresence.com.

aespinoza4• 13 years ago

iKnode doesn't lock you in at all. ;)

zan2434• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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...

jamesgpearce3• 13 years ago

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

igul222• 13 years ago

Pieceable was acquihired by Instagram, dude. They're probably not relevant to Facebook's mobile strategy any more.

sinzone• 13 years ago

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.

mcintyre19944• 13 years ago

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.

smrtinsert2• 13 years ago

soon we will be able to mine the realtime social space for memes and meme likes. sounds valuable.

facebook hasn't delivered. years ago i was sold on this service - i envisioned a future where i could find a doctor via my social network, or collaborate with a team member from within facebook on a document, or play a realtime game with a friend.

the only thing it seems to be good at is spreading wall spam and obscuring content. lets start with the ability to review wall posts by date instead of the endless scroll of stupidity.

tsurantino• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

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

youngerdryas3• 13 years ago

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

cletus• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

w1ntermute• 13 years ago

Google should've bought Facebook years ago, when it was still small.

smrtinsert2• 13 years ago

Facebook has a mindshare problem. I no longer consider it a driving force in my social interaction and I'm of the older generation. The younger generation seems to have abandoned it already. It's now a deposit for the occasional family photo and lately seems to be full of chain spam.

When you think back to the history of social networks (AOL, Compuserv, Friendster, Myspace) these things don't have a great half-life.

They need to reinvent themselves and fast, and extending their reach isn't as much the issue as reasserting relevance through great content.

jacquesm5• 13 years ago

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.

jjuliano2• 13 years ago

Given the very lucrative and competitive mobile market space, we will likely to see tremendous updates in the Android platform if Google have acquired it.

At least Facebook won't be biased about what mobile platform to support, it can support all other platforms without focusing on specific Android.

I use Parse as my backend for my iOS apps and it is absolutely useful. They provided a great service and the mPaAS approach to developing and managing mobile apps data and services is revolutionary.

mcintyre19944• 13 years ago

That's not really fair. Google seem to work very hard to provide a first class iOS experience on their own services. No reason to assume they'd shut that down on something they acquired.

gcb0• 13 years ago

you laid down an excellent foundation and then just dismissed it on the conclusion.

why does buying parse makes perfect sense for facebook? you already mentioned they are doing fine there, with their little piece of the internet in their app. why would they want to support 60,000 apps that does other things out of their little corner?

....oh, will they bait and switch them? all 60,000 apps forced to login via facebook only next month?

jtdaugh• 13 years ago

straight off the parse blog:

> Q: Will Parse apps have to use Facebook functionality? No.

jcampbell1• 13 years ago

I think Facebook is making a play to take over Android. Buying parse gives them an app platform and something like iCloud but it works.

iambpentameter• 13 years ago

Facebook bought strobe in 2011 which was also an "app delivery network" and did nothing with it. Why pick up another one?

julianpye2• 13 years ago

I always thought that Parse would be an excellent acquisition target for Azure, since the cross-platform support of Azure for mobile platforms is done so clumsily.

buzzrecords2• 13 years ago

Buddy would be a better acquisition target for Azure - their BaaS platform is more aligned with Azure's tech and Microsoft is an investor in Buddy (although, Google was an investor in Parse).

sidcool• 13 years ago

A very good piece of discourse. I wish HN had more of such contributors.

livestyle• 13 years ago

Odd that all the relevant backlash comments are pushed to the bottom.

freshfunk• 13 years ago

Facebook is a one trick pony as much as Google is a one trick pony (search).

drusenko• 13 years ago

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

youngerdryas3• 13 years ago

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

mseebach• 13 years ago

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?

rdouble5• 13 years ago

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.

pifflesnort7• 13 years ago

> 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.

ripter• 13 years ago

I can't speak on the push notification part, but I used Parse because it removed the need for backend servers. Parse handles the DB and routes.

kevinbluer• 13 years ago

They also offer a full mobile back-end (increasingly referred to as MBaaS...admittedly not the nicest acronym): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backend_as_a_service

joeblossom• 13 years ago

"full mobile back-end" is pushing it. Don't get me wrong, I love what Parse has brought to the market, but the capability of it is limited at the moment.

One of the biggest limitations is the length for which cloud code methods can run. (Nothing longer than a second, IIRC)

You can build a social sharing app, or share some data between apps, but building a "product" on it is limited to very simple cases.

argonaut2• 13 years ago

Not everyone knows backend development. And going from 0-60 with rails/django/sinatra/flask is non-trivial for a lot of people with no server-side experience.

I know a lot of college students, for example, who know iOS development after taking a class, but don't know any server-side stuff.

lawtguy• 13 years ago

There's definitely a bit hand holding with Parse that makes it attractive to a inexperienced developer. If opening a socket and sending and receiving binary data makes you nervous, then Parse is going to make you feel a whole lot more comfortable.

But the real win with Parse is that for small to medium sized apps, you don't need to manage your own servers. Apple takes care of delivery, Parse takes care of the backend. You don't need to worry about uptime or maintaince or 2 am notifications that your server is down.

rdouble5• 13 years ago

Parse is even more attractive to the experienced developer. After 15 years of backend bullshit, I was pretty stoked to find something which could make almost all of that pain and suffering finally go away.

cpher• 13 years ago

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... ;)

fizx• 13 years ago

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.

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

That's incorrect.

WayneDB• 13 years ago

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?

chrisblizzard3• 13 years ago

Nope.

BillySquid• 13 years ago

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

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

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

redrocket• 13 years ago

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

davidkatz• 13 years ago

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

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

Why? Email me - ilya@parse.com

jonknee2• 13 years ago

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).

mattberg• 13 years ago

Agree, I send millions of Push Notifications via Parse and I am also quite worried. I love their interface and documentation so I really don't want to switch.

icodestuff• 13 years ago

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

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

We won't.

chrisblizzard3• 13 years ago

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

mcs• 13 years ago

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

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

Shout out to HN favorite grellas for being our counsel.

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

grellas• 13 years ago

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

jacquesm5• 13 years ago

Now there is a good combination :)

Congratulations to all of you!

corylehey• 13 years ago

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

jamesgpearce3• 13 years ago

Why? No plans to let it rest.

modarts2• 13 years ago

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.

txttran• 13 years ago

Does $85M seem really cheap to anyone else?

jsnell2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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.

julianpye2• 13 years ago

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.

mamatta• 13 years ago

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/

namuol3• 13 years ago

/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).

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

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.

jonknee2• 13 years ago

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.

6thSigma2• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

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

estel2• 13 years ago

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

6thSigma2• 13 years ago

We are already using GAE for some cron stuff that Parse didn't support, so we will probably just roll our own API with GAE.

JunoRockey• 13 years ago

I'd take a look at Scringo (www.scringo.com)

jmacduff• 13 years ago

Congrats to the Parse team, great product and team.

(from the buddy.com team)

stephen• 13 years ago

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

jedc• 13 years ago

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• 13 years ago

I thought Zynga bought OMGPOP?

prezjordan• 13 years ago

Zynga bought OMGPOP :)

gailees• 13 years ago

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.

aespinoza4• 13 years ago

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.

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

We're staying.

aespinoza4• 13 years ago

Cool! See you guys in the trenches.

fizzbar3• 13 years ago

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

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

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

swombat3• 13 years ago

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...

Kiro2• 13 years ago

"so many". No-one is uneasy except the Facebook hating HN crowd. I think it's great.

khangtoh• 13 years ago

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.

zw3• 13 years ago

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.

joeybaggles2• 13 years ago

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

afinlayson• 13 years ago

Congrats!

macarthy12• 13 years ago

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

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

dmcy22• 13 years ago

Nice. What caused you to think that then?

techbubble• 13 years ago

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

gridmaths2• 13 years ago

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

modarts2• 13 years ago

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)

juanbyrge• 13 years ago

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

csmajorfive18• 13 years ago

lol

onedev• 13 years ago

lol

DrinkWater• 13 years ago

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).

grigy• 13 years ago

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

jpatel3• 13 years ago

Congrats to Parse folks!

mtitus16• 13 years ago

That was fast https://www.stackmob.com/parse/

Facebook buys Parse

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