Facebook Acquires Its Third Ever Company, Octazen

Perhaps part of Facebook's success is that it has always managed to stay focused on its main goal. Until now, this has been growth, adding more and more users at the expense of pretty much anything else. As a result, it hasn't been that active on the acquisition front, unlike most companies valued at $10 billion, with its track record showing just two acquisitions in the almost six years it has existed. Now, it's notching a third, with the acquisition of a small Malaysian startup, Octazen Solutions. There are not a lot of details and the move seems to be a talent buy, but there are a couple of details that left most people scratching their heads.

"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 to help drive the company forward in its efforts to be the central way for people to connect and share information," Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu told GigaOM.

Facebook called it a talent acquisition and Octazen as a business has been already shut down. The two-men team will now work for the social network as engineers. However, the company's site indicates that Facebook may also have been interested in the technology the startup has created over the years.

"The Octazen team wanted to let you, our valued customers, know that the company recently received an offer to acquire most of the company's assets and to employ those assets in a different direction," Octazen's website read. "As a result, effective immediately, Octazen will no longer accept new service contracts or renew existing service contracts, and will enter a transition period to wind down operations."

Octazen offers software and services to aid users invite their friends and contacts from one site to another. This comes particularly for sites that rely on a social graph, especially social networks. For the most part, Octazen scripts do this using public APIs and standard tools like Oauth, but in cases where this wasn't possible, the scripts resorted to asking the user for their full credentials and logging into various websites using them to scrape the data.