Earlier today, Facebook acquired NextStop, a social travel recommendation service. There’s been some speculation as to why this deal went down. Is Facebook getting into the travel space? Is this about their unlaunched location offering? From what we’re hearing, it’s much more simple than that. It really just boils down to Facebook getting a few very talented people at a relatively low price.

Facebook has been on a mission to scoop up as many smart management types as possible, we’ve heard from a few sources recently — some of whom have talked directly to Facebook. That may seem obvious — after all, who wouldn’t want the best talent? But Facebook is in the unique position now to have resources to simply acquire companies in order to get these people. And that’s exactly what they’re doing, we’re told.

NextStop is just one of a few companies that Facebook has been sniffing around recently in order to bulk up the projects under Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross, we’re told. It’s well known that Ross is leading the charge on Facebook’s Questions product, but their new emphasis on local — including the upcoming Places area of the service — is likely a focus for these deals as well. The NextStop acquisition makes sense in both of those arenas.

Two of NextStop co-founders, Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, are former Googlers with impressive resumes. Sjogreen led the Google Calendar team at its launch (and was heavily involved in Google Maps), while Graham launched both Google Groups and Picasa.

There are at least a few other members of the small team going over to Facebook as well, including one other former Googler. The team also had one employee who was formerly a member of the user operations team at Facebook.

But Sjogreen and Graham seem to be the keys to this deal. At Facebook, both of them will be reporting directly to Ross, we’re hearing. It’s not entirely clear yet what exactly they’ll be working on (and Facebook won’t comment). But the aforementioned projects are good guesses, as is anything Facebook is working on around events.

Facebook Questions has been pretty well covered both because the company is currently testing it with certain members and because some have dubbed it the next “killer app” of the service. But Facebook Places may end up being just as interesting.

The service, which the company has yet to confirm but we’ve previously spotted, is believed to be a big part of Facebook’s entry into the location space. We’ve heard that Facebook has a deal in place with Localeze to fill out this Places area — similar to a deal Twitter signed with the company. This may explain why Facebook was okay with NextStop releasing their own built up database of places under Creative Commons license — they don’t need that data.

Speculation aside, it’s pretty clear that the NextStop acquisition is the latest in a series of acquisitions Facebook has made to bring in high caliber talent. This dates back to Facebook’s first acquisition, Parakey, in 2007. And it includes their most high-profile buy, FriendFeed, last year. In both of those instances, Facebook hasn’t done anything with the actual product they acquired, and instead has used the talent behind them to further their own products and core team.

Just look at the roster from those two deals. The Parakey deal brought in both Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. Both worked at Netscape before they moved on to help found Mozilla, and create the Firefox web browser. Ross, as we’ve mentioned, is now the Director of Product at Facebook. Hewitt, meanwhile, created Facebook initial mobile web app (before there were native third-party applications on the iPhone) and went on to create the company’s excellent iPhone app (though he has since moved on to other projects).

With the FriendFeed deal, Facebook picked up a number of ex-Googlers, but none more important than FriendFeed co-founders Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor. Buchheit is often credited as being the creator of Gmail (and the Googler that coined the phrase “don’t be evil”) as well as the builder of an early prototype of AdSense (you know, that thing that makes Google all its money now). It’s not entirely clear what he’s working on at Facebook at the moment, but whatever it is, you can be sure it’s vital. Taylor, meanwhile, was the original manager behind Google Maps. He’s now Facebook’s CTO.

So that’s the creators of Firefox, the creator of Gmail, the creator of Google Maps, the creator of Google Calendar, and the creator of Google Groups and Picasa that Facebook has picked up through acquisitions. Not bad.

From what we’ve heard, Facebook got NextStop “cheap” as the company had done a couple rounds from a private investor, but never a big round. There had been some talk that they weren’t able to pull in a larger round and that’s why they went with the sale, but other sources say that’s not the case, it was just a good fit and good timing [see: update below].

Either way, Facebook is stocking up. They’re on a mission.

Update: Another source is now confirming that NextStop was unable to secure VC funding. So it would definitely seem as if Facebook got the team for a good price.

[photo: flickr/popfatticus]

It’s become a common trope to say that Facebook and Google are vying to become the operating system of the Internet. But there are some very clear hints of that in Facebook’s upcoming new design, which it just opened up to today in a developer sandbox. (You can see it at http://www.new.facebook.com, although you’ll need to download some libraries to start testing apps with it).

It appears that Facebook is moving closer to becoming a Webtop application, fusing elements of the desktop into the Web experience.

Eagle-eyed TechCrunch reader Ryan Merket (above) noticed something vaguely familiar about the new design. See the menu bar above his profile? Look closely. Its got some handy menus on the left that take him to his profile, his friends, applications, and inbox.

And on the right of the menu bar is a search box. That is the same visual metaphor you find in the menu bar on desktop operating systems.

The menu choices are different than on you desktop, because these tap into Web applications and resources. But the navigation is the same.

Menus on the left.

Search on the right.

And don’t forget the chat bar on the very bottom that, like a status bar, shows you how many of your friends are online and lets you chat with them.

Could this be the work of Facebook’s Parakey acquisition from last July finally bearing fruit? Parakey was the pre-launch startup from Firefox co-founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt that was working on a “web operating system.” Facebook was rumored to have beaten Google on the deal.

Facebook is already well on its way to becoming an operating system of sorts for the Web. (This time around there will be room for more than one OS). It is the application platform of choice for many Web developers. (Tomorrow, it turns one year old). But why reinvent the wheel on the user interface side when everybody is already trained how to use a menu bar? The aha moment will be when people click on those menus and a whole new world opens up to them.

It turns out that wasn’t the case. The acquisition price, say two sources close to the deal, was paid in cash and was “less than $4 million,” providing investors with just a 2x return on their investment. Meanwhile, Parakey founders Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt were rewarded handsome stock options to join Facebook as employees in lieu of any cash compensation.

The primary investor in Parakey was Sequoia Capital, but a number of angel investors also participated in the sub-$2 million round that closed in December 2006. The investors were told about the acquisition in mid 2007 just prior to it closing. The terms of the deal were fully disclosed to them, including the number of shares that were being granted to Ross and Hewitt.

Some of those investors clearly weren’t happy with the fact that they were getting a 2x cash return while the founders received different, and likely far more lucrative compensation. Their preference would have been to receive Facebook shares or simply to have kept Parakey as an independent entity with a chance for a larger liquidity event down the road. But reputation matters in silicon valley and they made the decision not to disrupt the deal to avoid being labeled as difficult investors. Clearly, though, it left a bad taste in their mouth.

Even as investors are lining up to fund new Facebook applications, some others are saying they’re unlikely to invest in startups that are focused only on that popular social network/platform. The fact that Facebook is now involved in directly funding some of these application developers via fbFund only makes them more wary – the company may simply pick off the most talented developers and leave the companies, and any investors, behind.

It is often hard to muster up much sympathy for the venture capitalists that fund all of the startups popping up in silicon valley and elsewhere. But their money keeps the system running smoothly. If they don’t see a fair return based on the risk they are bearing (most startups fail outright and are a write off), that well oiled machine could come to a grinding halt.

In this case its not clear that investors were treated unfairly. They did get double their money back for a six month investment, after all. But the Parakey acquisition is an important data point that will be considered by others in the future. Just because Facebook comes knocking on your door doesn’t mean its going to be a big payday for everyone involved.

Parakey was founded in 2005 and raised a seed round of financing from Sequoia Capital (although this was never confirmed). There is a good background story on Parakey, which will include both browser and client software, here.

As he describes it, from a user’s point of view, Parakey is “a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do.” Translation: it makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. Most or all of Parakey will be open source, under a license similar to Firefox’s…Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too.

Update: Was Google a bidder for Parakey? One source says they were, but couldn’t compete with Facebooks pre-IPO stock. Facebook isn’t saying if this was a stock or cash deal, but it wouldn’t be dumb to assume that Facebook stock was at least part of the acquisition price. In an IPO the value of that stock would probably increase dramatically, giving the Parakey stockholders a nice additional return on investment.