VentureBeat

Benjamin Ling, who we learned earlier this week is leaving the top marketing spot at Facebook’s developer platform, will reportedly return to his old company, Google. Valleywag first reported the rumor, and Kara Swisher’s sources confirmed with the exact job: Ling will be taking over monetization efforts at YouTube.

The musical chairs within Facebook, between Facebook and Google and between Facebook and other startups grows ever more complicated. The YouTube monetization job was recently vacated by Shashi Seth, who left to head revenue efforts at startup Cooliris. Google’s difficulties in making money from YouTube are well known, although chief executive Eric Schmidt said yesterday that it “doesn’t hurt our bottom line,” and that he’s pleased with YouTube’s continuing growth.

Ling left Google’s e-commerce team last fall.

Last fall, Benjaming Ling was recruited out of Google to help lead the Facebook developer platform product marketing team. But he’s planning to leave Facebook within the next couple of weeks, I’ve heard from sources within Facebook. The reasons aren’t clear. The company, which has confirmed the news, is only publicly saying that he’s leaving for other career opportunities, via a written statement.

The platform product marketing team is under the purview of Elliot Schrage, who himself was recruited out of the public policy arm of Google this spring to become Facebook’s executive in charge of communications and public policy.

That’s just one of many organizational changes the company has been going through as it continues to grow — it’s now the largest social network in the world — and as it continues looking for revenue streams worth billions of dollars. The company is still hunting for a new vice president of engineering and a vice president of product. Company founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has final say over these areas in the meantime, sources say.

All sorts of obvious questions spring to mind. Can this departure be explained as a company-wide conflicts between the old guard of mainly engineering-focused early employees versus the new, business-focused executives? A number of other early, engineering-focused leaders have left in recent months, which on its face lends credence to that theory.

Inside sources say this isn’t so. Other executives, like Matt Cohler and Adam D’Angelo, have reportedly left for more personal reasons, while the engineering culture remains prevalent across the company. The platform team itself is still dominated by technical types.

[Update: Kara Swisher also has the story, and spoke with Ling. From her article:

Ling would not be specific as to his reasons for leaving the hot social network, but he said he was pursuing “another opportunity.”

Mysterious!

He added that “Facebook is a tremendous organization and I would not leave it if it were not for a great opportunity."]

At the f8 conference last month, Ling himself helped introduce new components of the platform (see photo, below) including a “Great Apps” program for the most meaningful applications, a new funding contest for promising new applications, and other incentive-focused measures.

The earlier versions of the platform have been laissez-faire — or “anarchy” in the words of one inside source — the new measure are intended to ensure that developers don’t abuse users through things like spammy invites. Of course, that philosophical shift — from what some developers refer to as “small government” to the new “big government” — is very real.

But it’s unlikely that Ling is leaving because of such philosophical differences, given his involvement in the latest changes; one source suggests its the flux within the organization, and the competing, talented executives, that are contributing to the organization changes, and departures.

Still, Ling’s departure must hurt the company to some degree. “If I could pick any three people in Silicon Valley to start a company,” one source says, “I’d pick Cohler, D’Angelo and Ling.”

Facebook’s official statement:

Facebook confirms that Ben Ling will be leaving the company in the coming weeks to pursue other interests. We wish him well and appreciate his great contributions to the early success of Facebook Platform. Platform is poised for continued growth and success and the company is on track to deliver the range of major initiatives announced last month at f8, including Facebook Connect, fbFund and the Great Apps and Application Verification programs. Each of these programs have a strong team of professionals focused on attracting the best developers to Facebook Platform, helping developers succeed on Platform, and helping users find and enjoy great applications on Facebook.

[Lower photo: (CC) Brian Solis, www.briansolis.com and bub.blicio.us.]

In what is at least a brilliantly executed PR move, leading engineers from Google, Facebook and Plaxo have joined the Data Portability Workgroup — an effort by a number of web companies to develop best practices for sharing user data across sites and applications.

Google’s Brad FitzPatrick and Plaxo’s Joseph Smarr — two long-standing advocates of data portability — are joining. More surprising is the addition of Benjamin Ling, a former Googler who recently joined Facebook to help lead its developer platform.

Maybe Facebook will eventually let third parties fully export all of its user data, letting users do things like export their Facebook friends’ emails en masse to other applications (see our coverage of Plaxo’s back-door effort to do this on Facebook, last week).

Maybe, through this workgroup, Facebook will iron out how that feature might be implemented?

For now, though, the glass of fully portable social data is far less than half-full — Facebook is just agreeing to talk directly with these other companies about such possibilities.

Nevertheless, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb, thinks the news is a “bombshell.” Duncan Riley at Techcrunch says “this day will be remembered.”

Given the initial hype — much of which has now deflated — around Open Social, Google’s nascent social networking application programming interface, I feel compelled to stay a little more skeptical about the significance of this news until I see concrete results.

Here’s what DataPortability is up to, in a nutshell:

“[A]mong other things, [We're] actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability. This means users will be able to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.”

In other words, a fuse may be lit but no bombs will go off until all of the workgroup member companies actually define and agree on standard ways of sharing data across sites. I hope these companies will, but they haven’t, yet.

Here’s the latest:

1) Another Googler goes to Facebook, to head its developer platform
2) Facebook traffic apparently took a dip last month — [Update: Or didn't. See Om's update, and a big looping conversation about Facebook on Techmeme]
3) Madonna latest in string of musicians to ditch record labels
4) Mozilla preparing mobile web browser, may improve mobile web user experience?
5) Mixx.com launches to let publishers give users relevant content
6) CBS acquires gossip site Dotspotter for $10 million
7) What happens when a wiki gets old?
8) Will Crescendo Ventures be saved?
9) “Virtual TV” network raises $8M
10) Industrious Kid to part ways with Steamboat Ventures
11) SendMe, a San Francisco mobile entertainment services company, acquires Mbuzzy

Another Googler goes to Facebook, to head its developer platform – Benjamin Ling, a high-ranking Google employee who has most recently led its e-commerce effort, including online payment service Checkout, is leaving for Facebook, reports Netly News. Facebook has been successfully recruiting out of Google for months, notably stealing former YouTube chief financial officer Gideon Yu (our most recent coverage) earlier this summer.

Facebook traffic apparently took a dip last month — [Update: Are we the only ones tired of talking about Facebook?] Comscore will soon release a report showing that the number of unique visitors to Facebook decreased 9.3 percent to 30.6 million in September from 33.75 million in August, according to GigaOm’s early look at the data (see table); Pageviews were also down 3.8 percent.

Some wonder if it is Comscore that is having problems collecting accurate data although Facebook itself has been citing Comscore for much of its publicly available traffic statistics.

Madonna latest in string of musicians to ditch record labels – The ever-popular and controversial artist is about to leave Warner Brothers Records for a deal worth around $120 million with concert promoter Live Nation, reports the Wall Street Journal. The money is in live performances and merchandise, not the music itself, as TechDirt has been pointing out for years. Other major artists, such as Radiohead, have also announced distribution deals that cut out the labels.

Mozilla preparing mobile web browser, may improve mobile web user experience? – Mozilla, the nonprofit foundation that leads development on open source web browser Firefox, has announced detailed, long-term plans to develop an open source web browser designed for use on phones and other mobile devices. The move dovetails with many other efforts to develop open source mobile software, such as Google’s rumored Linux-based mobile software, as gadget blog Crave points out.

Mixx.com launches to let publishers give users relevant content — The service is yet another recommendation engine, offering up content, including news stories, video and photos, depending on a user’s interests and locations. Mixx has signed deals with USA Today, Reuters.com, The Weather Channel, Kaboose and uclick Comics. It is owned by Recommended Reading, of McLean, Virginia. It has raised $1.5 million round of funding, in a round led by Intersouth Partners.

CBS acquires gossip site Dotspotter for $10 million — Valleywag got the scoop here.

What happens when a wiki gets old? — The grandaddy of them all may be revealing the answer. A study by a Wikipedia user of the site’s stats, which have been unexamined for a year, shows that edits and new account creation have both fallen from their peaks, by 20 and 30 percent respectively. The unanswered question is whether the drop in traffic is a result of the wiki fad wearing off, or simply because the online encyclopedia has reached a critical mass of information, leaving fewer opportunities to add more.

Will Crescendo Ventures be saved? — The Silicon Valley firm has been on the ropes for some time, and we wrote last year that it may not be able to raise another fund if it didn’t produce any results soon. (Scroll way down to see our original story about the firm; apologies for the buggy page). Yesterday, one of its companies, Compellent, finally went public, and it saw a 77 percent increase in its trading price in the first hours of trading — the second best performance this year. The company is unprofitable, a network storage company among a lot of competitors that have also filed to go public, or already having gone public — all losing money. The company is based in Eden Prairie, Minn., and its technology serves small and mid-sized customers. We’ll see if it’s enough to allow Crescendo to raise another fund from its skeptical investors. Crescendo owns 21 percent of Compellent, now worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But regulations force the firm to wait six months before it can cash in on the investment. Partner David Spreng did not respond to a request for comment.

“Virtual TV” network raises $8M — The secretive Israeli company RayV has raised $8 million in a second round of financing from Accel Partners, according to Globes. One founder, Oleg Levy, was previously an executive at Kagoor, which was acquired by Juniper Networks. It says it wants to offer a new way for “consumers to find, review, and talk about local businesses. A cross between a web-based social community and an online business directory, RAYV is where people go to express their opinions on any type of local business and get recommendations from a trusted source – their peers.” Accel Partners declined comment.

Industrious Kid to part ways with Steamboat Ventures — Industrious Kid, the Oakland, Calif. company that raised $6.5 million last year to build its site, imbee.com, as a social network for kids, is going to try to buy out one of its investors, Disney-affiliated Steamboat Ventures. Apparently, the two sides have differences in strategic direction, and so Steamboat wants to get its $2.5 million back. The companies didn’t comment on the specific reasons.

SendMe, a San Francisco mobile entertainment services company, acquires Mbuzzy — The terms were undisclosed. Mbuzzy is a four-year-old mobile start-up based in San Mateo, Calif., that lets friends share content with each other over the phone, and claims 500,000 users. SendMe previously acquired Vector Mobile, publisher of solow.com.