But the Parakey deal does provide clues to Facebook’s ambitions.

You can bet that at any given time when they’re on their computers, people are either checking email, instant messaging, watching a video, working on a document or a spreadsheet, reading the news, or looking at or sharing photographs.

For the most part, doing all of these requires firing up a number of different websites and programs.

But what if there was one site that could handle all of these tasks? It could mean a more productive experience for the user. And for that lucky site, it would mean a very sticky, if not captive, group of users that would be attractive to advertisers.

That hasn’t happened, of course, because no one is the leader in all of these categories. Microsoft’s Word and Excel are ubiquitous on home and office computers. Yahoo has one of the most popular news destinations, and its site Flickr leads the photo-sharing category. Google’s YouTube is No. 1 for online video.

What’s more, the desktop and Web universes are still almost wholly separate. Moving data from one space to the other can be frustrating. Microsoft’s announcement this week of a Web version of its Office suite had critics griping that the company didn’t go far enough in extending online capabilities.

And that’s where Parakey comes in.

“Parakey was a way to unify websites and desktops so that there was no longer the idea of a desktop application. There were simply websites that you went to that were able to interface with your PC,” said Hewitt.

Inspired by the minimalist design sensibilities and intuitive user interfaces of Google’s search engine and various Apple products, and believing firmly that supposedly simple tasks like sharing photographs and videos were much harder to do in reality, the pair set out to create an environment even their mothers could enjoy.

Parakey works through the use of literal keys. Users can modify and view files through a browserlike interface, dragging special keys onto the groups of files they want to share with others.

Through the use of a small downloadable program, Parakey also lets websites interact with files on a user’s hard drive.

While melding the online and offline worlds is not a new idea—Google and Adobe have already released early versions of similar programs—what makes Facebook different, and also sheds light on the logic behind the potential implementation of a Parakey-like system, is the social-networking site’s development platform.

Instant-messaging and photo-sharing applications have already made their way onto Facebook, and while most of the applications are time wasters, it’s not hard to imagine a day when Facebook versions of more sophisticated applications will appear. That is probably Facebook’s bet anyway: If you offer a unified experience with applications of high quality, what’s the reason to go to another site?