Friday, February 12, 2010

This is the story of a girl....

Who came all the way from Ohio to work at MySpace. Starry eyed at the thoughts of millions of concurrent users leveraging software she built, she packed her bags and moved across the country in a jiffy. It was not disappointing.

MySpace was filled with color and character. There were many, many faces all over the amazing complex in Beverly Hills. There were crowded corridors filled with pictures of MySpace Secret Shows and meeting rooms with people excited doing collaborative design. This girl and her friends built the Activity Stream at MySpace and soon realized that it was essential for the stream to flow outside the walls for it to stay alive and thus she embarked on a quest to find a sensible way to exchange this valuable information about users at MySpace. In this quest she found new friends and realized that she truly identified with the values that they were fighting for: letting the user be in control, opening up the walled garden and allowing anyone big or small to have the same opportunities by using open standards.

As you may have guessed, that girl, woman actually is me :) And today is my last day at MySpace. I am filled with nostalgia but excited about the future and pursuing my dreams.

You may be surprised since I have been doing a series of conferences. As Group Architect I was able to not only work with the Activity Stream team but also on the Developer Platform with the backing of the COO, I was able to have my ideas heard and executed. It was these projects which provided massive openness of the user’s MySpace data via Open Standards like OpenID, oAuth, ActivityStrea.ms and PubSubHubbub that filled me with joy because of all the possibilities we provided for other people to be creative.

But I have chosen to leave. While I was able to have some temporary creative freedom this is not the norm or part of what other engineers enjoy and I do not feel there is one cohesive push to deliver the best we can deliver anymore.

To my friends and colleagues at MySpace, some parting advice:
It is imperative that MySpace puts in place strong technical leadership who can attract good technical talent and make well-informed decisions. It is important that they stay connected to rest of the world and work on interoperable standards and solid products which benefit the end user. Many of my fellow engineers have fantastic ideas and a plan for phased delivery.

I wish them the best of luck and I am sure we will cross paths and work together.

If everything goes as planned, I will also be working with more of you in the community and helping showcase and build upon one of the most incredible social products I have ever seen.

Yes that is right ! I am happy to announce that I have decided to join Facebook as an Open Source and Web Standards Program Manager.

I will be working closely with David Recordon, Luke Shepard and another fantastic group of people.

This is going to be a great year. Get ready !

22 comments:

hober said...

Congrats on the new position!

Anonymous said...

Congrats Monica, I'm excited that you're joining FB, and I'm excited that we'll be able to keep collaborating on opening up the social web!

Unknown said...

Congrats Monica! Great news!

Unknown said...

Congrats Monica!! Best of luck as you continue to open up social data on the web :)

Unknown said...

Congrats Monica :) and all the best.

Unknown said...

Congrats Monica! We'll miss you.

Unknown said...

Congratulations Monica. Thank you for the support and all the help this past year. Our loss... FBs huge win.

Robbie Coleman said...

I still remember interviewing you with Luc and the interview running over. Didn't you miss your original flight back? What a run you made @myspace! I know you'll never argue with anyone as much as me. ;) you have such passion in what you do and I totally respect that! Good luck Monica! Now go and open Facebook as wide as possible!

Unknown said...

Wow, that's big news... Congrats, Monica! You achieved some great things here @ the 'Space, and I'm sure you'll continue to do the same over at FB.

Emon said...

Wow .. congrats Monica!!!

Kevin Freund said...

Congrats Monica. I already miss working with you and the other rock stars at MySpace. Best of luck at Facebook!

Unknown said...

We only worked together a few times, but I always admired your dedication to not only MySpace, but to making developing on the internet wider for everyone. Some might say Facebook is gaining a great person, but really it is the web.

Keep conquering it!

Julien said...

Congrats Monica!

Monica said...

Thanks so much - its all from working with you guys of course !

Edwin Khodabakchian said...

Congratulations.

Marko said...

Jesus Christ you are hot. Well done facebook.

Unknown said...

LOL @ "she truly identified with the values that they were fighting for: letting the user be in control, opening up the walled garden and allowing anyone big or small to have the same opportunities by using open standards."

You'll soon find that FB has the highest walls of any garden out there. I hope you can break down the walls and free the information; but I won't bet on it.

Unknown said...

Congrats Monica! Quite a surprise, but I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you in your new capacity! ;)

Hemant Kumar said...

Congrats Monica! Great News!

Test Mc Ghee said...

Congratulations Monica! Well done.

barce said...

500 Days of Summer is an awesome film! I hope that a conversation around reasonable crawling of friend data is something you and your new Facebook teammates can discuss. I was hoping the FoaF format would show up but it seems kinda dead right now.

Congrats and good luck!

Marc Canter said...

WOW! Blogging on Blogger to tell MySpace where to shove it and going to work at Facebook.

A true open standards kind of gal!

Now we just gotta get you to move back to O-hi-O.

:-)

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