Facebook ropes in Mozilla VP & installs Live Search, while clearing off a few Controversies
While still largely lagging behind Google and Yahoo with the market share and the search rankings, Microsoft yesterday announced that it had expanded its deal with Facebook and will now be integrating its Live Search right into the popular social network. Microsoft already has a 1.6% stake in Facebook which it bought at $240 million while valuing Facebook at a whopping $15 billion.
With this move, Microsoft will try and utilize the space for serving its search results, both traditional and sponsored, to the members. Live Search currently accounts for a mere 9 percent of the total search queries, where Google holds a big chunk with a nice 62 percent share while Yahoo takes 21 percent. This deal is Microsoft’s effort to try and push itself up the ladder, trying to make use of the large number of the members and the immense popularity of the Social Network.
Facebook, on the other hand, has tried to bring some Mozilla power into its system. The company, which gave a glimpse of its new interface design to many of its members recently, has roped in Mike Schroepfer, responsible for the development of FireFox as the Vice President of Engineering at Mozilla. Mike joins Facebook as the New Director of Engineering. Mark Zuckerburg, the CEO of Facebook, who was recently felicitated by Harvard, said:
Mike has a lot of experience building great products and engineering teams. At Mozilla, he built Firefox 3 and manages the product development process — a particularly impressive position given the global, collaborative and open process in which Mozilla operates and develops its products. Facebook has similar values and Mike will be a great addition to our engineering team.
Facebook last hired Ning’s CTO Mark Andressen to its Board of Directors. The post of ‘VP Engineering’ is still lying vacant after a number of early employees left the company recently, including their CTO and VP Product Management.
The Social Network recently faced stiff opposition from an anti-knife campaign from London called Urban Concepts about a game, which when installed as a part of the user’s profile, allowed him to virtually knife someone. The game, which the developers have named as ‘Shank’ (a street term for knifing) installs with the Superpoke application which allows users to send greetings such as hugs and kisses to their friends. The game has now been removed by Facebook.
The social network hosts a wide range of applications, available to be installed by the members, a majority of which are installed by third-party developers. With over 80 million users, these games are hugely popular among all the age groups. Whether it was Facebook’s own decision to force the developers to remove the game, or the developers removed it by themselves is still not known.
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