This doesn't add up at all. If it's about usage data, they would be buying Flurry in a heartbeat. I'd bet the acquisition is more about a huge challenge Facebo

This doesn't add up at all. If it's about usage data, they would be buying Flurry in a heartbeat. I'd bet the acquisition is more about a huge challenge Facebook faces, which hasn't had a good engineering solution for years, and for which the solution is still not clear: the chasm between the web as a platform and the native mobile platorms. A lot of FB's value has not survived trying to jump that enormous gap, and the major casualty has been the concept of "FB-as-a-platform". There is nothing equivalent to Flash in mobile through which they could control social games like they did back in the early Zynga days. Apple and Android are the ones who really control the platform, including payments, for social games and other apps on mobile. FB would love to have a platform they could control as tightly as Apple controls the app store, but they are simply closed down behind a technical barrier. Parse is probably the only successful initiative of a mobile platform that smartly sidesteps the control of the walled-garden-guards. It takes control of the back-end and its access code, and trying to leave the native client part to become just a UI skin, which is under the control of Apple/Google, but which in FB's dream scenario would become a minor part. I think FB's wet dream about Parse would be to find a set of calls that can be abstracted, which define the actual app logic, which can be implemented equally on Android/iOS/HTML5+JS and through which iOS and Android can become just skins to the real app... and offer that platform for developers to develop FB apps, which would run in iOS/Android/the web and for which the gatekeeper could be FB itself.