World News

Platform Evangelist Benjamin Ling to Leave Facebook

Aug 12 at 11:11pm by

Benjamin Ling, who oversees the Facebook platform and has been one of its most visible evangelists over the past year, is leaving the company, according to Eric Eldon at VentureBeat. It’s unknown yet where Ling is headed, but Facebook has confirmed the departure. One company Ling is probably not headed to is Google, which he left to join Facebook back in October of last year.

Ling joins former Facebook employees Adam D’Angelo (CTO) and Matt Cohler (VP Product Management) on a growing list of high level employees on the engineering side of the social network that ar heading for the exits. Of course, this isn’t just a game of attrition, but more a game of musical chairs. Facebook plucked Mike Schroepfer from Mozilla only a couple weeks ago to become Director of Engineering.

While Ling’s tenure at Facebook was certainly brief, last month’s F8 conference marked the culmination of much of what he was brought in to work on. I spoke with him at Graphing Social Patterns in Washington DC back in June, and many of the initiatives he discussed – the profile re-design, a focus on more useful applications (the Great Apps program), and Facebook connect – are now up and running on Facebook.

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Original post:
Platform Evangelist Benjamin Ling to Leave Facebook