Facebook’s latest acquisition is a company called Octazen Solutions, which i believe is one most people have not heard about.
Ocatazen Solutions, a small Malaysian startup, are maker of a contact importer that the social network had already been using to grow its number of users by encouraging them to invite their email contacts.
The word around the web is that Octazen is an incredibly successful data-scraping operation, grabbing users’ social graphs from one service and porting them to another.
Spokesperson for Facebook says: “We’ve admired the engineering team’s efforts for some time now and this is part of our ongoing effort to add experienced, accomplished technical talent,” and refers to the purchase as a “small talent acquisition.”
The real intention of Facebook on the acquisition is not clear as users can already find new Facebook buddies via major services like AIM and Gmail.
With more than 400 million users now Facebook has kept fairly quiet on the acquisition front, focusing primarily on talent buys rather than products. In the last one year Facebook has bought Parakey and Friendfeed.
Could the acquisition be an answer to Google Buzz, or just to a push to consolidate it’s presence on the web. We’ll have to wait and watch.
