Facebook adds open source guru to its books

The news started to emerge in various Twitter feeds and personal blog posts on Monday: David Recordon, a Six Apart developer and prominent open-standards advocate, has left the blog software company to take a job at Facebook.

Recordon, who formally announced the job change on his LiveJournal, will take on the title of senior open programs manager. "This past year as I've worked closer with teams at Facebook, I've been impressed by their products, smart people and innovation," he wrote in the post.

It wasn't so long ago that Facebook was seen as the ultimate in closed-off technology, with profiles hidden behind a log-in wall and features built with in-house technologies rather than open standards. At that time, a hire like Recordon would've seemed to many a ludicrous match. But Facebook's changing: it joined the OpenID Foundation earlier this year, made a big chunk of its developer platform open-source, and its Facebook Connect universal-log-in product has earned both developer and mass-market approval.

Recordon said he doesn't want to say too much until after he's actually started at Facebook, which will be on Monday. But speaking to a few of his soon-to-be Facebook colleagues, and they sound excited: the five-year-old company has never had an already-prominent open-source advocate on staff, like Google's Chris DiBona.

Facebook, which plans to raise its employee head count by 50 per cent this year, made several very prominent hires earlier this month when it acquired start-up FriendFeed in a deal that seems to have been aimed largely at getting its ex-Google founders on board at Facebook.

Original article: Facebook hires an open-source dude from CNET News.com