Facebook has acquired Parakey. This is big news because a) buying other companies isn’t something a company thinking about being acquired by Google, Yahoo, or Microsoft in the near term would likely do and b) in case you haven’t heard of Parakey, it’s by two co-founders of Firefox and makes no secret that it is one thing: a web-based operating system.

While talk for at least the past couple of years has been about Google creating the de-facto Web OS in almost a stealth-like manner, Facebook appears to have no qualms about making it known they want to be a Web OS – first with the Platform launch, and now with this. This isn’t the only way the two potential major rivals of the future differ: whereas Facebook is seeming to launch a Web OS that completely revolves around everything social, Google’s approach is decidedly anti-social – almost awkwardly so.

There’s a lot of ‘Google is the new _____ ‘ (fill in 1990s power company), and ‘Facebook is the new _______’ (fill in 1990s or 2000s power company – including Google) analogies going around the Internet these days, but my feeling is that it might be hard to compare either of these companies to ones that have come before. If either or both succeed in making a Web OS, it could so drastically alter things as we know it that even calling such a thing an ‘OS’ may be inappropriate – it may not just end up being an operating system, it may end up being an extension of billions of peoples lives.

I just find it very interesting that two companies appear to be headed in the exact same direction but are getting there in almost opposite ways. Time will tell which approach was better, but if I were Google I would definitely work on upping my social factor pronto. Either that or simply use some of that 20% time to invent a time machine (probably already in progress) to go back to two years ago and buy Facebook.