14 DAY TRIAL // While the vanity URL 'landrush' may be on everyone’s minds, there are still other pieces of news related to the social networking site, and among them there’s the one about the company having just hired Greg Badros to be Director of Engineering.
Badros is currently a Google Senior Director of Engineering and joined the search giant as early as 2003. He started out in charge of the AdSense engineering team in 2004 and led it until the project became hugely successful, bringing Google billions in income. While with the Mountain View-based company, he also led several teams in charge of Google Calendar, Google Reader and even Gmail. Lately he has been head of the Application Platform team. Before joining Google, Badros worked at Go2Net, later acquired by InfoSpace, serving as Chief Technical Architect at both companies.
“Greg Badros has joined Facebook as a director of engineering, reporting to Mike Schroepfer. Greg is one of the most accomplished engineering talents at Google, and it’s wonderful that he has decided to bring these talents to Facebook and take on numerous responsibilities across the engineering organization,” Facebook officials said in a statement.
What the social networking site is interested in though is Badros' experience with AdSense, as it has been trying to get a better revenue stream monetizing on its huge user base. The Google AdSense program is the company's biggest cash maker and has been the main driving force behind its success. Facebook is getting a steady stream of income but it is much lower than what MySpace for example is making, at least for the time being. In fact MySpace's biggest earner was its deal with Google to display ads using the AdSense program, but also to use Google Search as its internal search tool. Google however has learned its lesson and hasn't been very pleased with the deal’s outcome on its side, which is why it isn't likely to renew it. Whether or not getting Badros will prove as successful for Facebook as it was for Google remains to be seen.