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This afternoon word that Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook, was leaving to start a new venture start to spread and within a short period of time, a number of blogs had access to a Facebook note posted by Moskovitz’s developer companion, Justin Rosenstein. Apparently Rosenstein and Moskovitz are leaving to create an enterprise level productivity software package.

Sounds thrilling doesn’t it? Well, the duo is a geeky bunch and they are now moving on to live out a new tale. Best of luck to Rosenstein and Moskovitz on their new venture. If it is anything nearly as successful as Facebook it is sure to be a hit. Techcrunch received a comment from Mark Zuckerberg on the depature: “Dustin has always had Facebook’s best interests at heart and will always be someone I turn to for advice.”

As I posted a few hours ago, “Over the next few months we can only assume that there will be more executives to come and go.” I didn’t know that we’d learn about another executive to leave so quickly! Posted below is the note posted by Justin Rosenstein.

I was a nerdy little boy. (Not much has changed.) Starting at age ten, I would spend hours a day holed up in my room, alone or with friends, programming til I collapsed. When I grew up, I wanted to be a software entrepreneur. I knew this with as much conviction, and about as much knowledge of what the role actually entailed, as other kids might have wanted to be an astronaut or President. In high school, I even started “Smiley Technologies, Inc.” and bamboozled some friends one summer into working on a Java-based productivity suite for group collaboration… but by September we learned the hard lesson that it takes more than three months to take on Microsoft Office.

By college, I felt pretty confident I was never gonna work for anyone other than myself. That is, until I heard about Google’s associate product management program. I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for Google, and the opportunity to be on the inside, working as a mini-entrepreneur, was just too sweet to pass up. So I promised myself I’d stay at Google for just a few years, and then head out on my own.

That is, until a few years later when I got a friend-request from Dustin Moskovitz, who had co-founded Facebook with his college roommates around the time I’d joined Google. I told him I wasn’t interested in another job, but we met up for lunch anyway, and I’m glad we did. The more I learned about Facebook, the more inspired I was by its mission and team, and eventually decided this too was just too important an opportunity to say No to.

I’m really happy I took the job. I’m thrilled with the time I’ve had at the company, and with the incredible peers I’ve gotten to know and work with. But something else exciting happened in the year and a half since I joined Facebook. I started spending a lot of time after work talking to Dustin. Efficiency-through-software was dear to his heart as well, and we would stay up til 3am raving about how shortcut keys and high-level abstractions would Change The World. We shared a passion for technology, for entrepreneurship, and for using them to solve the same set of problems.

As our visions for how productivity software could work came into alignment, we thought about building it inside of Facebook. It was an attractive option in many ways, and neither of us was eager to exit a company that was in such an exciting phase of its development. But at some point it became clear that doing so wouldn’t be good for Facebook or for us. Facebook needs to continue its mission of making the world more open through social software, without distraction, and the new project requires a company built around it from the ground up, with the goals of efficiency and group collaboration embedded deeply into its DNA from day 1.

So we’ve decided to leave Facebook (in about a month) and start a new company, to build an extensible enterprise productivity suite, along with a high-level open-source software development toolkit, built for the Web from the ground up.

We see this new venture as very complimentary to Facebook. We hope our products will become to your work life what Facebook.com is to your social life. Our software will use Facebook Connect as the default option for identity and authentication. Our user interface will adopt many of Facebook’s conventions, creating a seamless and familiar experience for current Facebook users. And if our new development tools turn out to be useful, we hope the Facebook engineering team will come to adopt them.

Leaving Facebook makes me sad, but I feel I have to follow my passion on this. I can’t say enough about Facebook and the friends I’ve made here, and I am enormously excited for the company’s further success, a destiny I’m confident it will reach regardless of my participation in it. Finally, I’m really grateful to Mark, Chris Cox, Sheryl, Yishan, Chamath, Elliot, and others, who’ve been helping us make this a smooth transition, and to my family for guidance and support. Thank you; it’s meant a lot to me.

Yesterday, Matt Marshall reported about some new Facebook management reshuffles. One of them was the promotion of Christopher Cox from director of human resources to Director of Product. As Matt Marshall points out, this is a pretty “significant position because he will control the direction of future product releases.”

The other promotion is Mike Schroepfer, who was previously a lead engineer, to VP of Engineering. The company had been searching of a VP of Engineering but apparently the company decided not to go ahead and hire a VP of Engineering. The company continues to have significant executive shifts on a regular basis. Earlier this week Facebook hired a new general counsel.

There is also news that we wrote this morning that Facebook is in the process of letting employees finally sell their shares. While we don’t know if these two new promotions will result in more shares for each employee, Mike Schroepfer may have to wait some time before he cashes out given that he has only been at the company for two months.

Over the next few months we can only assume that there will be more executives to come and go. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date on the changes!

Yesterday Valleywag got a scoop that Facebook employees who have stock options will now be able to sell out on November 1st. Apparently the process will be through a stock buyback plan. There are a number of factors that contributed to this decision none of which we can speak definitively on. We definitely can speculate though!

One thing that Valleywag claims is that trying to sell shares outside of the company will have “career-limiting effects”. Following the announcement that Facebook employees could sell shares there were a number of investment banks and private investors that said employees had reached out to them to try to sell shares.

Facebook wants to control who is buying shares and this is a great way to do that. While employees could try to go outside the company to get a higher price per share, it will most likely be not worth the risk. Employees can sell up to 20 percent of their shares or $900,000, whichever is least, according to Valleywag. The countdown to the Facebook share sale day has started.

Are you trying to get in on the action? Unfortunately we don’t have any shares we can sell you so you may want to try contacting Facebook instead

In a move signifying the influence of the Facebook platform in the social web, Friendster has announced that it has deployed supporter for the Facebook platform. Developers can now choose between the Facebook Platform, OpenSocial, or Friendster’s API to launch applications on the platform. Whether or not Facebook developers will actually choose to launch on Friendster is unknown but it just became a whole lot easier.

Read more on at Social Times.

The UK Press Association is reporting that a hospital staff has been banned from using Facebook after one of the nurses decided to share photos of her boobs on the site. While the nurse was not completely naked, she did flash a camera resulting in total breast exposure. When asked for comment on the topic, the hospital chief executive said “We were extremely disappointed on discovering the image, and took steps to have it removed immediately.”

Nudity on Facebook is prohibited and users participating in such acts can and will be punished for violating the site’s terms of service. While the I’m sure the photo made for a few good laughs around the hospital, it has resulted in an entire organization being banned from the site. Soon enough we’ll have doctors walking out of the hospital since they can’t login to stalk their friends!

AllFacebook has attempted to contact the wild boob bandit but all we received back was the following anonymous statement: “Boobies Rock!” Not sure how to interpret what appears to be an extremely immature statement. We will keep you up to date with any news that we receive regarding this flagrant act.

This morning the Irish Times reported that Facebook has confirmed its plans to establish one of its international headquarters in Dublin. The headquarters will be responsible for activities taking place within the company “across Europe, the Middle East and Africa.” Last week I wrote about Facebook hiring people in India, Hong Kong, Syndney, and the U.K.

In a statement to the Irish Times, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer, said “After exploring various locations throughout the region, we decided Ireland was the best place to establish our new headquarters. As we grow and strive to make Facebook into a place for people around the world to connect and share information, we need local operations to better advance our efforts. The talent pool in Dublin is world-class, and recruiting local talent will help us better understand the needs of local users and the regional dynamics that, in turn, can give us better insight into what features matter most.”

The company continues to grow rapidly and given their rapid push to grow internationally, one has to wonder if the company will still be able to operate at break-even. European traffic for Facebook has continued to grow recently. The company has definitely faced challenges though as it hired Smaboo, an agency in Germany, to throw parties and attract the attention of local citizens.

Earlier this week I posted about Facebook hiring a new general counsel. Well as Caroline McCarthy pointed out, that wasn’t the full story. Apparently Ted Ullyot has been hired to replace Rudy Gadre who left the company back in July. According to Law.com, Gadre hadn’t received much family time and wanted to leave the company. Facebook has had a substantial number of employees leave the company which is odd for most startups.

Thanks to Facebook’s policy of letting early employees sell some of their shares, many have been able to profit a little from the company’s continuing success even though it has yet to go public. According to Caroline McCarthy, Gadre has moved to “search-and-discover start-up Evri, which is based in Seattle, has hired him as vice president of business operations. He’ll be in charge of legal issues, intellectual property, and various marketing and “audience building” tasks.”

There appears to be a number of executives that like jumping from start-up to start-up to get their hands on some early shares. I’m not suggesting that Gadre is one of those executives but it’s interesting to see how many of the early executives have left the company and have ended up in other positions already.

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When Facebook released their platform last year, the company generated more buzz in the Valley since Google went public. Thousands of developers flocked to their platform and now more than 40,000 applications have been built. Many of the early applications were widgets and one application in particular, Bumper Sticker, attracted over 12 million installs and was reaching more than 1.5 million active daily users at one point.

As a joke I created the Bush Countdown Clock when the platform launched and amazingly I attracted close to 50,000 users. While the application was nothing more than a simple flash badge, it helped a lot of people express themselves. Expression is not Facebook’s purpose though, sharing is. Widgets or badges that help users express their personal beliefs, ideals, and personality are now harder to find with the new design.

Thanks to the redesign all the badges which were “cluttering” the profile have been moved to a “Boxes” tab which most people don’t visit apparently. When the new profile was first rolled out, the traffic to my application actually jumped a little but oddly enough on September 11th, things took a turn for the worse. I’m not sure what happened but my guess is that a lot of the profiles started to get shifted over.

While many users still don’t like the new design (including close to 194,000 people who’ve signed a petition requesting that Facebook put back the old design), the decision to switch appears to be final. The implication is shown in the chart below which illustrates the dramatic drop in traffic. Ultimately my application has been cut by more than 60 percent.

While my application was only build as a joke some applications were attracting hundreds of thousands of daily users. My application was completely a widget though and provided practically no interactive substance. Other applications which actually provide users with a valuable experience in addition to help them share information appear to have survived the shift over to the new design.

It’s clear though that widgets have not survived the shift over and my guess is that within a matter of weeks we will see most top-performing widget applications practically disappear.

A couple weeks ago I wrote about Facebook preparing to overtake MySpace domestically. Last week Hitwise published data that suggested that MySpace was more than 3 times the size of Facebook domestically. What?!? Nobody appeared to even question the statistics. Today Royal Pingdom used Google Trends to produce similar results to those produced by Compete which I published a couple weeks ago.

So which is it? Is Facebook being dominated by MySpace who is attracting 3 times the domestic traffic (according to Hitwise) or are they about to surpass MySpace? By using rational logic I’ve deduced that the latter is accurate: Facebook is about to surpass MySpace. The company has attracted the largest number of users in history to an individual social network and it continues an upward trend.

Personally, I have watched my friends which once stayed glued to MySpace make the shift to Facebook over the past few months and my expectation is that this will continue. While MySpace may have a music platform and may be generating 3 times the revenue, Facebook continues to grown and that’s really all that matters for the time being.

The company wants to have the most accurate mapping of the social graph and they won’t stop until they get there. It is becoming a central distribution platform for sharing content among all our contacts. My other guess is that the future of Facebook is much brighter than comScore and Hitwise. Both companies have continuously produced inaccurate data which has in some cases impacted the public markets.

Google for instance took a nose dive after comScore suggested the site’s traffic had slowed which would make it more challenging to meet earnings expectations. The stock eventually rallied after it ended up beating estimates, contrary to comScore’s misleading data. For being such large companies, it’s time that some of these analytics companies start producing accurate data.

Do you think Facebook will surpass MySpace domestically in a short period of time? Who’s data is accurate, Compete.com & Google or Hitwise & comScore?

Last night Facebook rolled out their highly anticipated new iPhone application and with it a whole slew of new features. Some of the new features includes:

• Access to a complete newsfeed duplicating the functionality currently available on the site. This includes feed item commenting which makes this a mobile competitor to FriendFeed,
• Access to all messages in your inbox,
• Full-access to notifications,
• Tabbed profile design with wall, info, and photos, and
• Search of other users outside of your friends with the ability to request new friendships.

These updates and others bring the majority of Facebook’s functionality to the iPhone. When it comes to mobile social networks, Facebook is proving that they are keeping on the edge with features galore to keep users happy. I for one might start using my iPhone again (instead of my Blackberry) with this new application.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook continues updating their applications on other mobile platforms including Blackberry and Palm or if they decide to put the majority of their efforts into the iPhone. The is a welcomed update and I look forward to what features the company plans on rolling out in the near future.

One thing that I’m most definitely waiting on is the addition of iPhone notifications so that instant messages within Facebook as well as messages in general can provide pop-up notifications. This is much easier then forcing me to open up the application every time I want to check my messages.

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