“The way it was”: when confirming a friendship, users would be asked how they knew the person – from school, work, etc. – but were also given the option of moving on without checking any box.  It was when the “skip this step” button disappeared that Facebook’s problems began.

“[I]f Google was the Database of Intentions and Facebook is the Database of Connections, then Facebook’s value is maximized if Facebook knows the nature of every single relationship within its database,” reasoned Ashkan Karbasfrooshan.

But lots of people, including Fred Wilson, Pete Cashmore, Chuq von Rospach, and Ouriel Ohayon didn’t much care about Facebook’s value.  “This combined with the facebook spam that’s taking over my email inbox is getting me damn close to leaving the service entirely,” wrote Wilson.

In Mashable’s “Comments” section, Blake Ross (who joined Facebook during the Parakey acquisition) put matters into a slightly different light.  “This is a bug that will be fixed soon,” he assured readers.  “Trust me, we find this as annoying as you do ”

And now the problem is indeed resolved, and yet another Facebook uprising appears to have been quelled.  Whew.

While it hasn?t disclosed exactly what Parakey is doing, previously published reports hint that the company was working on technologies that would allow offline access to web applications. It wouldn?t be a surprise if Facebook made an off-line version of its social service.

Meanwhile both Robert Scoble and Jeremiah Owyang are concerned that Facebook is a black hole of data – it all goes in, but doesn’t come out. Is it a surprise?

If you take a look around at the top internet companies and they’re all black holes. Can you think of a company as successful as Facebook that has a two-way street of data? The only reason we should expect something different from Facebook is that they’re a social network, so you’d expect the “social” would also apply to the sharing of data.

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Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook to work on the development of the Facebook Platform and the company’s Web site.

"Blake and Joe built the Firefox web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform," said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook.

"The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook."

Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform to bridge the gap between information on the Web and the desktop. Financial terms of the deal were not released.

"Facebook Platform is finally making it easy to share experiences with friends and family over the web, a goal Joe and I have worked toward for years," said Ross. "We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry."