Facebook restructures developer platform management
Most notably, communications czar Elliot Schrage will no longer be in charge of marketing the company's developer initiatives.
In a post on the company's developer blog on Friday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced some changes to the management of its third-party developer projects. This encompasses both the Facebook platform, which opened up the social network to third-party applications and took off like wildfire when it launched in 2007, and the newer Facebook Connect, which brings Facebook log-in credentials to participating outside sites.
No employees have departed the company or were laid off in the process, a Facebook spokesman told CNET News in an e-mail.
The new head of platform and Facebook Connect engineering is now Mike Vernal, who takes over from Charlie Cheever. Cheever will be "moving into a new role as an engineering manager where he'll be focused on building some of our new products and ways for people to share information," Zuckerberg wrote in the blog post.
More notably, platform marketing responsibilities will now be handled by Ethan Beard, who has until this point been in charge of business development at Facebook. He takes over from Elliot Schrage, Facebook's vice president of communications and public policy, who will remain in charge of his other tasks within the company.
This makes sense, since Schrage, who was hired away from Google in May to be Facebook's communications czar, wasn't the most logical fit for developer platform marketing. His background's in law, not programming; Schrage had taken over platform marketing duties when Benjamin Ling, another former Googler, left Facebook and returned to Google.