Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company | Hacker News Reader

Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo to leave the company

venturebeat.com

47 pointsmarkbao25 comments

This is only a first-hand account, but it seems to me that all of my friends have "gotten over" facebook - the ones that haven't unactivated their accounts as a social statement only check it every once in awhile for messages. Most friend's profiles are out of date, and only a small fraction of people seem to have found facebook apps continuously interesting (which they're sure to let me know with invitations to join them).

The novelty of facebook seems to have long worn off. I don't know if this is just me or a broader trend, but if I were in charge of fb, I'd look into it.

Well, the community here is definitely different. For every one person like you saying people have gotten over Facebook, there are hundreds of fraternity/sorority/college students that immerse themselves into Facebook day in and day out, uploading tons of pictures and adding applications.

It's understandable why people here tend to not give a damn about Facebook. You all have more important and productive things to do with your time. However, there's a whole world of mindless young kids who join groups aimlessly, post pictures of the almost daily college parties, and find joy in spamming friends' walls.

I use Facebook, but only as a means to keep in contact with people whom I wouldn't keep in my phonebook. It serves as a nice mediator.

"I use Facebook, but only as a means to keep in contact with people whom I wouldn't keep in my phonebook. It serves as a nice mediator."

I think this is a sentiment of many people either actively or passively; most people have far more "friends" on Facebook than they would truly consider friends. It's more of a place for acquaintances than a place for true friends / people you keep in contact with on a regular basis.

It is for this very reason that I maintain that the "killer app" (if there is/can be one) for "web 2.0" is not going to be a social network like Facebook, but something that enhances e-mail to include these popular social network functions (or an app that uses who your correspond with via e-mail as an indication of who your actual friends are and keep you updated on _their_ affairs). My reasoning for this is the fact that, for most people, the relationships we really care about / keep up are still mostly maintained via e-mail more than anything. Sure, we can write on our friends' FB accounts or carry on twitter conversations or us IM, but how many friends do you have that you don't e-mail?

E-mail was the killer app for the web to begin with and I don't think its on the way out like many people seem to. Its still the most prolific and convenient communication method for the web.

I would argue that my really close friends are people who I don't email much, but call instead. So your killer app would have to have access to my cell phone call history in addition to email history, and build the social network on a combination of calls and emails.

Right, I recognize that and agree that the top of the top is still phone calls, but as far as the web as a communication medium goes, e-mail is still the most used and most important.

Plus I couldn't immediately think of a non-intrusive way to collect call history from any phone so that idea was out ;-)

I've created a very effective way to keep family and old friends up to date on your doings when life gets busy (especially w kids) by letting digital photos create the chronology, and letting you send your doings by email in a mixed text/photo format whenever you find time to catch up. I hope you're right that solving this problem can be a killer app.

http://ourdoings.com/

"mindless young kids who join groups aimlessly, post pictures of the almost daily college parties, and find joy in spamming friends' walls" this is so condescending, how about just saying there are millions of people that enjoy facebook and use it a lot.

The reason I used that line is because that's the differentiating point between why a community like the one here doesn't see the value in Facebook, and why millions of kids do. Sure, Facebook serves other valuable purposes like the one it serves me, but where Myspace and Facebook get their click intensive users are from mindless kids.

You can't just say millions of people enjoy it, because within that group, there are many varying segments that play varying degrees of significance in contributing to why Facebook is successful. And the mindless groups of kids who join groups aimlessly, having that show up on their news feed, and having their friends join, ultimately creating this huge domino effect of clicks, is probably what contributes the most.

If things like hi5 and myspace - in my opinion - much worst than facebook, are still going strong, I can't see how facebook won't continue to be relevant for at least few more years

I kind of share your same observation, most of my friends dont use facebook as much, but they still do, they check it like email to read all the messages, know about outings, know about new events (concerts, bdays, etc .... )

So to your observation I add, its possible that the first wave of facebook users ( i will call them the addicts ) have faded away

But now there is the second wave ... the casual users wave which is probably just as big, only different!

Finally if facebook post site usage statistics, this should be a more concrete indication of how well the site is doing

I missed the whole memo on how MySpace is worse than Facebook.

They've dealt with their (larger than Facebook) scaling issues with what appears to be industry leading uptime, they're the biggest domestic social network by about a factor of two, and they've kept up feature for feature with Facebook if they weren't already years ahead (photos, the wall, applications, etc.).

myspace is always at least 15% broken. Nobody publicly complains about it because everyone is ashamed to be using myspace...

"D’Angelo is well-liked at Facebook, though he has mostly stayed behind the scenes. His departure is doubtless a blow to the organization — and also an opportunity to bring in a seasoned replacement to handle the site’s continuing expansion."

Is there evidence that the "seasoned replacement" is important? I've looked over a few articles at the Harvard Business School library, but I found nothing that conclusively showed "seasoned replacements," especially CEOs, made a positive impact on a startup.

I think there's probably a lot of precedent for "seasoned replacements" making a positive impact when it comes to technical infrastructure. Not that I can point you to any. But my sense is that most big sites on the web owe a good chunk of their scalability to some experienced ops genius(es).

That could be the case at Facebook. I had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Rothschild, Facebook's VP of Technology, last year. He was very obviously both experienced and smart.

He was at Accel at the same time as me... he is definitely both experienced and smart.

Facebook has 500 employees. They haven't been a startup for a long time.

I'd guess yes. Writing great code, and building a great product with a small team is a very different skillset than managing a medium to large company of dozens to hundreds of engineers.

Bingo!

Brad Feld has a good article about this phenomenon: http://tinyurl.com/2rwmty

Or access http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/10/cto_vs_vp_engin.ht...

If true, he's probably just burned out. If I were the CTO for a company that required the coordination of software across 10,000 servers (and growing), I'd need an extended vacation, too.

Jeff Rothschild will likely take over a lot of his portfolio, which is good for Facebook, because that guy is rockstar.

Congrats to Adam, he's done an amazing jobs scaling facebook to meet the unbelievable growth demands.

facebook is good for single people

Hey! Don't downmod kul!

This topic was discussed at the TechCrunch UK meeting on Fri 9 May 2008 ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=183305 ) which Harj and/or kul may have attended. Apparently, some people use Facebook solely to get dates with their friends of friends. Apparently, such activity can get intimate relatively quickly and with relatively high probability.

If this is true, what's next?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com