Another Exec Unfriends Facebook
Facebook is fun to use. But it's not a fun place to work — as confirmed by the defection of Net Jacobsson, a key executive in Facebook's effort to cash in on your life online.
YouTube ads must be big in Japan
YouTube has never been this exciting. And I don't mean the puppy videos. The video-sharing site is frenetically experimenting with every imaginable form of advertising, from prerolls to rollovers to overlays. There's even that staple of late-night television — headache pills! For this, we can thank Ben Ling, the…
Why Facebook is foundering
The great hope of the Valley, the startup everyone thought was the next Google, the company whose IPO might restart the stock-market gold rush for everyone, is not well. Why? Look to its founder. Mark Zuckerberg is mismanaging his creation's transition to greatness. In Facebook's own parlance, the company's plight is…
Commercials your new punishment for not clicking on ads
YouTube will now run a post-roll commercial after you watch a clip if you don't click on the overlay advertisement that pops-up on partner videos. It's the kind of exciting, innovative thinking from re-hire Ben Ling, who was brought back into the Google mothership to figure out how to turn YouTube's revenue deficit…
Leave Sheryl Sandberg alone!
The best thing Valleywag ever did for Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was to call her a liar. That's just not done in the genteel office parks of Silicon Valley. It garnered the embattled executive a much-needed wave of sympathy within her company, on which she's now planning to capitalize.Valleywag's coverage last…
Millions of reasons why Google's glad to have Ben Ling back
Don't feel too sorry for Ben Ling, the star product marketer who leapt from Google to Facebook back to Google in less than a year. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — herself a Google alum — has threatened not to let Ling keep the shares he earned to date. It was a petty move that goes against Valley standards of on how…
A week we'd never lie about
Sheryl, Sheryl, Sheryl. It's been quite a week, for us and for Facebook's COO. Sheryl Sandberg isn't the kind to yell, like the 10 tyrants we featured this week. She's much more subtle than that. Or at least we thought she was, until she botched product marketer Ben Ling's high-profile return from Facebook to…
Liar, liar
It seemed like such a simple proposition. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg wanted Ben Ling to lie for her, and get rich doing it. Ling is — was — the director of Facebook's applications platform, which had garnered the social network much of its buzz over the past year. But he'd been supplanted by Elliot Schrage,…
Ben Ling boomerangs from Facebook to Google
Where's Ben Ling headed next? We hear he might be headed back to Google — not a startup. Ling, a talented product manager, is closely watched as a talent barometer. His defection from Google to Facebook last year kicked off a series of trend stories about people leaving Google. Less than a year on the job, he's …
Sheryl Sandberg's reign of terror
Facebook's COO is tearing down the temple. That's the only conclusion I can reach after witnessing the Sheryl Sandberg's management of the Palo Alto-based social network. What I hear from inside Facebook: She demands total loyalty, and brooks no dissent — even the healthy, boisterous debate that's common to…
Who's the next Facebooker to go?
The departure of star Facebook director Ben Ling has been roiling Facebook since word first spread at the social network's Palo Alto headquarters yesterday. One inevitable question some Facebookers are asking: What does this mean for the price of our stock? If Facebook were publicly traded, it's unlikely one…
Ben "Bling" Ling to leave Facebook
Ben Ling, Facebook's high-profile director of platform product marketing, considered a star poach from Google, is now rumored to be moving on from Facebook. Kara Swisher has further details. We think we know the story: Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, in a widely derided move, put a nontechnical guy, her aide-de-camp…
Early to bed, early to rise makes Facebook hackathon lame in Zuckerberg's eyes
COO Sheryl Sandberg and PR chief-turned-platform politician Eliot Schrage, Facebook's no-fun adults, are fully in charge of Facebook. The latest evidence? Facebook's second annual F8 developers' conference has another "hackathon." But unlike last year's all-night session, it hardly deserves the name. It starts at 3…
Why Google's drowning in talent
Looking at the departure of top Google flack Elliot Schrage for Facebook and concluding that the search engine is suffering a "brain drain" is the laziest journalism on the subject I could imagine. The BBC's take on the subject is predictable, citing the same names — Ben Ling, Ethan Beard, even chef Josef Desimone —…
Facebook's Ben Ling shakes highly portable thing
"Bling," as he's known, famously defected from Google to Facebook last year. More recently, he joined the Data Portability Workgroup. Was this video the kind of personal data he wants to make it easier to spread around?
