Facebook co-founder, colleague leave for new collaboration

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and colleague engineer Justin Rosenstein surprised a few people when they announced they were leaving Facebook to start a new company that will help facilitate collaboration in the enterprise. What that means exactly still isn't clear, but in an email Rosenstein made public that there could be some hints:

"We see this new venture as very complimentary to Facebook," he said. "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."

If you read between the lines, it sounds to me like they are planning on creating a Facebook experience in the enterprise. If you're wondering why the two didn't just do that at Facebook, Moskovitz explains in an email:

"I wouldn’t have agreed with asking the company to divert significant resources to approach a project so different and so boundless in scope. Every time we introduce something new, we do it at an opportunity cost and this is too large a detour to take when we are already moving swiftly in the right direction."

Whatever the project is, it involves collaboration, seems to use the Facebook platform, and is too different to do in-house (or they were looking for a good excuse to leave, all the happy talk aside). It should be interesting to see what becomes of this project in the coming months. There certainly is a strong technical pedigree behind it.

For more information:
- read this VentureBeat article