FaceBook buys Parakey
Parakey is a WebOs startup started by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt.
What is Parakey? (from Parakey’s website)
Parakey is a platform for building applications that merge the best of the desktop and the Web. Like desktop applications, these applications work offline, offer more privacy than pure websites, run quickly, and integrate with your computer and its devices. But like Web applications, they are also more creative, visually alluring, accessible from anywhere and potentially accessible by anyone. In short, Parakey apps are designed to be both useful and social, a combination that is too rare today.
What is WebOS (Better word would be Web Desktop)
WebOs allows user to work seamlessly offline and online. You can work offline and whenever the computer you are working on connects to internet, all your work - documents, spreadsheets, transactions, emails, photos etc. get uploaded to the web and downloaded to your current and other devices. You do not have to remember to upload/download. Nor do you need to use special softwares for each application to synchronize with web and your other devices. WebOs takes care of it.
A detailed definition of WebOs can be found here.
There many other WebOs startups. Most popular being YouOs and Xin . There are other products which have the similar features like Google Desktop, Firefox 3 offline and development tools like Adobe’s Apollo.
Here is a good Adobe Apollo Ebay Demo which shows usefulness of this kind of computing.