Jed Stremel, Facebook’s Director of Mobile who has been with the company for four years, has resigned, according to a post on his Facebook profile. Stremel was charged with leading the company’s mobile strategy, and was previously involved in Business Development at Facebook.
Below is Stremel’s bio, taken from last year’s MobileBeat conference page.
Jed Stremel oversees Facebook’s mobile strategy transforming how individuals find and express information relevant to their life. Prior to Facebook, Jed played key partnership, business operations, and strategic roles at high-growth businesses. He spearheaded mobile initiatives for Yahoo! building the company’s efforts to empower seamless communications across SMS, WAP, Java, BREW, and other mobile technologies. At Tellme Jed managed distribution, promotion, and licensing relationships with leading online and telecommunications partners. Jed holds a law degree from Santa Clara University and a bachelor’s degree in economics and public policy from Duke University.
Other recent departures from Facebook include Josh Elman, who was Facebook’s Platform Program Manager and was deeply involved in the launch of Facebook Connect. Elman joined Twitter earlier this week as a product manager.
We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment.
is he goin to join twitter as well
Facebook isn’t nearly as innovative as it was a year ago and two years ago… they’re reaching a peak from a product perspective unless they can overcome the mental image of what Facebook is in the mind of the consumer.
People don’t think ecommerce, buying stuff when they think of Facebook. They think of sharing photos and reconnecting with friends & family.
It’s also become awkwardly bloated and unfriendly to new users with so much going on.
Twitter is stealing the status update market at a rather rapid pace due to it’s simplicity and openness. Facebook Lite was awful IMO and did nothing to bridge the gap with Twitter.
Facebook has so much going on because it has miles more depth than Twitter. It isn’t a confusing proposition for the average consumer whereas Twitter definitely is.
Almost everyone I speak to that’s in my demographic doesn’t understand why they would need a Twitter account when they area have a Facebook one, this means that it becomes less attactive to get involved with.
Does Facebook need to bridge the gap with Twitter? I think it’s vice versa.
My wife has always been ahead of me in social networking adoption. A year ago she was all about Twitter. Then later in the year she shifted towards Facebook. Last night my wife said to me “Facebook is like AOL in the late 90’s. They are getting arrogant and I’m bored of it”. Tonight she was talking about how Twitter Lists have reinvigorated her interest there.
We will integrate our platform with both Facebook and Twitter regardless. An innovation and talent juggle between them will only benefit users. It will be some time before user behaviors around social networking truly stabilize, so we’re in for a ride.
Twitter has more upside, but I wouldn’t count FB out yet. There traffic still appears to be on roll and with 300 million users, they’ve got buttloads of opportunities to monetize.
It is on a roll and they do have a lot of users. Bbut as Alex mentioned… look at AOL. Also, look at MySpace – once a power house of social networking.
Even Twitter could still be challenged down the road. Social networking (social media?) users are finicky and the tech community that leads the charge is always looking for the “next cool thing.”
4 years? mhhh… Looks like all his Stock Options just vested…
@Nivco – I agree. All Stemel needs to do is wait for Facebook to IPO or get acquired by Microsoft, and he’ll be retired.
Hewitt’s next. Check out his Twitter.
Maybe he’s painting the boat blue if you catch my pitch.
Jed was really a good person, its really unfortunate to know that he resigned for this simple reason. I think he should have waited for sometime.
a couple of things. @ahawkinson – you know that Facebook and Twitter are different services, right? One is purely ‘micro-blogging’ while the other is ‘hey, here’s what ME is all about – here are my friends, interests, etc.’
Twitter and Facebook are not in competition, for now, so let’s get that straight. Facebook and Google (and possibly now even twitter) are all in a ’search’ war, b/c that’s where money has been made.
Can you monetize FB? maybe. Can you monetize Twitter? has yet to be seen. Can you monetize Google? pfft. of course.
Let’s not compare apples to oranges anymore. K?
Totally agreed that Facebook and Twitter are clearly different. I’ve posted in the past a bit about this here http://bit.ly/gpfF6 and here http://bit.ly/11j30S. In terms of what we’re doing with each platform, we hold those differences clearly in mind and largely aligned with the perspective that I shared in my posts.
However, despite their differences, they are both vying for attention and growth as primary networks where social discovery and social commerce occur. Despite their very different strengths, we’ll see a lot of intersections between them as they work to capture the time and attention of users and try to keep top talent in place to build their businesses.
Facebook is expanding its operations. Heard they are opening offices in India in Feb2010
heard theres a new app poised at taking fbook’s dwindling student population
Where it says “resigned” read “fired”.
Thats unfortunate. Hopefully he will land on his feet