Ex-Firefox exec plans Facebook for Android

Mike Shaver already announced last year that he's moving to Facebook after resigning as vice president of technical strategy for Firefox.

Mike Shaver
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

And now we know what he'll be doing there: he'll be engineering manager for Android app development.

Given the immense membership of Facebook, there are few mobile apps in the world that are as important as Facebook's. The company announced in December that Facebook has 800 million users.

Shaver tweeted on Friday, "This week, I started as the eng mgr for Facebook's Android team. Doing cool stuff — some probably obvious, some rather not. And hiring!"

The news caught the attention of some tech insiders. Mike Belshe of start-up Twist offered congratulations and a suggestion that Facebook should use SPDY, a web-acceleration technology that he developed while at Google; SPDY now is being built into Firefox. "I figured we'd get it for free from Android's WebView and HTTP libraries :-P," Shaver replied — a little dig at the fact that Android's browser doesn't yet support SPDY.

The new job means that Shaver is changing from one hot market — browser development, and its closely related field of web development — for another. With the explosive growth of smartphones, mobile apps today are ever more important as a mechanism for using the internet.

The two fields aren't as far apart as it might appear, though.

When Firefox evangelist Asa Dotzler asked Shaver, "Will you all re-write the Android Facebook app as a web app?" Shaver replied that the app is already "mostly a wrapper around the m [mobile] site", but that Facebook needs more interfaces that browsers don't yet offer to software. Specifically, Shaver said, the Facebook app needs interfaces to send notifications, to manage a mobile device's camera and to interact with its contact list.

Shaver, a Canadian, had thought it possible that he could start working at Facebook in November, but cautioned at the time that exact timing is up to the United States' Immigration and Naturalisation Service. It appears that Facebook and Shaver have had to wait a few more weeks than they would have preferred.

Via CNET