Congratulations Channai and team for making it into the first two pages of our local papers.

FRRO is proud to be the technology partner for Unpopular Radio. Our team of professional server administrators help to ensure the smooth operation of their shoutcast stream so that the Unpopular Radio team can concentrate on developing excellent content for their listeners.

Here are some new features of WordPress 2.6:

• Post Revisions: Wiki-like tracking of edits
• Press This!: Post from wherever you are on the web
• Shift Gears: Turbo-speed your blogging
• Theme Previews: See it before your audience does
• Word count
• Image captions under your image
• Bulk management of plugins
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries
• Plugin update notification bubble
• Customizable default avatars
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI

2.6 is pretty much identical to 2.5 from a plugin and theme compatibility point of view, so upgrades from 2.5 should be pretty painless. The 2.5 branch will no longer be maintain so everyone is encouraged to upgrade.

» Download WordPress 2.6

PS: The current version of my plugins should work well with WordPress 2.6 except WP-DownloadManager. Nevertheless, I will release updates to all of them tomorrow.

A total of 37 companies converged at Suntec Convention Centre for a 2-day conference, with key exhibitors that included namesake powerhouses like Friendster, Google, Yahoo! SEA. In addition to that, there were SMEs that were making their presence felt - Comwerks Interactive, i-POP, and Acronym Media. However, the real deal was in the keynotes as well as the various SIG speeches that were held during the event.

There were a couple of interesting sessions that were by-invitation only - of which one of them featured Wendy Cheng and Jeff Ooi in a session titled “Blogging Universe - Building Brand Awareness or Losing Control”. There were other head honchos and key decision makers from various conglomerates that were present at the convention to present their nuggets of valuable insight into a market that has gotten people spending US$25-billion dollars worldwide just on online advertising alone in 2007 (according to statistics revealed by PricewaterhouseCooper’s 7th annual Global Etertainment and Media Outlook report).

Here’s an excerpt of our visit at the event:

Friendster

Friendster certainly made their presence felt at the exhibition with their towering booth splattered with a sign that speaks about its equally towering success: “Connect to over 70-million people globally”. In accordance to statistics provided by comScore Media Metrix - Friendster has the highest engagement (minutes spent per month per unique user) value than its competitors such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Hi5. In addition to that, Friendster is claiming to be the most popular social network in Asia with over 52-million registered users and 36-million monthly unique visitors from the region. While that claim may be true to a certain degree - in retrospect, however, an old article by Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at HITWISE, placed more visits to Facebook than porn sites:

Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here’s a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I’ve actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines.

Statistics, like the ones above, may not remain the same after a few months but it would definitely have made a big difference in the way social networking sites have affected our lifestyle. In fact, the popularity of these social networkings site have spawned an army of clones, varying in content delivery methods and features. An aggregated list can be found at Mashable, aptly titled “Social Networking GOD”, with provision to links for close to 350 such sites.

In the last several months, Friendster has revealed a couple of features to further diversify their social networking site’s capability. One of them is the Friendster Mobile, a feature that enables the site to be mobile-friendly for users to access to. Coupled with the localization languages, it is a definitely powerful tool to reach out to the non-English market in the Pan-Asian region. To this date, there are a total of 9 languages that the site can be accessed in - Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. While localization is a powerful methodo to open their doors to a wider audience, it is their developer’s program that takes the cake.

If we do remember, Friendster initially started out serving their pages written in JavaScript before moving them over to the PHP platform. It wouldn’t be right to say that Facebook was the first to come up with a developers’ playpen (read: API) but it is in the case of Facebook’s success story with the developers’ community that has probably spurned Friendster to go along with it as well. In any case, community-driven web applications and its contents are here to stay for good.

Financial Times

This is actually labeled as a cyber lounge that’s sponsored by Financial Times, for delegates to sit down and rest their tired soles. There were also a couple of notebooks were placed at the booth for public usage.

Singapore Press Holdings

An equally towering presence in the exhibition hall was SPH’s booth. One of the major product featured at the booth was the Rednano, touted as “Singapore’s first local search and directory engine”. One of the key features that Rednano was offering was its advertising capabilities. While their advertising features were interesting, as much to the delight to of any company that wished to reach out to the local audience - one of the discerning features that I found out was that it lacked any user customization capabilities. Unlike most web statistical analytical tools/sites that you can find - Rednano lacks such. I found out (according to the staff that I spoke to) that you would have to get back to Rednano if you, per say, wanted to obtain statistical charts for your marketing reports. Any form of information would be given upon request, and Rednano will revert back to you with your - request. It is quite understandably that the product is still in its beta phase and they might push the project into a full-fledged advertising platform in the next month or so but for now, knowing that the advertising rates are on-par with any other given advertising agencies yet with the absence of information at your fingertips when your boss needs it - unless you are easy-going with your ROI statistics despite the assuring privacy policy.

dgm

dgm, otherwise known as dealgroupmedia, is an online advertising and marketing company that specializes - well, in everything that’s online. One of their specialty is in search engine marketing consultancy that branches out in ethical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) solutions and PPC (Pay Per Click) management.

XM

The corporate colors decked out at XM’s booth must be one of the more interesting ones that I’ve seen so far. Their corporate brief states they have been around since 1994, which is a pretty long while and possess a string of successful A&P campaigns which included the all-too-familiar Nokia’s L’amour mobile phone campaign. They are a provision of front-end solutions for the integration of web presence alongside with any A&P/marketing campaigns.

FOX Networks

FOX Networks was at the exhibition to showcase a pioneering concept that they called the BrandFormance, which they claim is a brand-building performance-based solution. For me, it is a prettier name for “AIO”. The strong point about their solution is that they have access to a slew of websites that include the National Geographic Channel, FOX-relevant channels, as well as other premium third-party publishers. Lest, not we forget that they have access to scripted banners on their video-on-demand streaming channels. Frederic Guillet, Regional Director for Southeast Asia and Hong Kong operations, said that “today’s audiences are increasingly immune to advertising messages that flash across their screens”. In addition, they are putting it across that their solution will allow advertisers to purchase quantifiable results on premium websites at a far lowest cost than if they were to obtain advertisments via a traditional media buying strategy.

Aktiv Digital

Aktiv Digital is part of the dgm corporation’s subsidiary known as dgmAdNetwork. However, they represnt some of the biggest clients in the Pan-Asian market including BT, O2 and Vodafone. Just recently, Aktiv Digital had announced a partnership with Crunchyroll to handle the latter’s advertising inventory in the Pan-Asian region. The partnership will aim to deliver a full range of online marketing services, from display and rich media solutions to advertiser integration and micro-sites. Kun Gao, CEO of Crunchyroll, added “with a strong track record with international advertisers (such as Ubisoft, Puma, Best Buy, Comedy Central and Dimension Films), Asia¹s 500 million online consumers represent a huge growth opportunity and a key market for us. Crunchyroll is making a dedicated contribution to the future of the Asia Pacific online industry and believe a partnership with Aktiv Digital is ideal in securing success.”

Google & DoubleClick

Google - the household name in the interconnected global network. It needs no further explanation. However, DoubleClick did make an appearance at the show. We even got a free compact-disc with a pretty printed label of DoubleClick stuck on the top side. It was supposed to be loaded with some information, we assume, but it didn’t work that way when we loaded the disc into the optical drive.

Yahoo! SEA

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s team made their presence felt at the exhibition hall. There were staff who provided a step-by-step demonstration with explanation on how to use their advertising/marketing applications - done on a huge 46″ LCD screen. They even had a booklet, titled “Smart Start”, that you could take back for reference as an “insider’s guide to managing your new search marketing account and spending wisely [sic]“. Something worth to note - Yahoo showcased a preview of its search applications for mobile users using intuitive mini Web pages to present search results on mobile screens and voice recognition technology at the recent CommunicAsia2008.

Sadly, we weren’t able to obtain access pass to the various discussion conferences. Hopefully, however, we may be able to make in time for the ad:tech Shanghai 2008 that will be taking place this coming November.

All personal views iterated in this article are of the writer’s own and does not reflect the Company’s point of view.
Do you think the author’s photography suck? You can reach the author via michael.feng@frro.net.

When this video was placed up on the likes of YouTube and Collegehumor, viewers who saw it were all up in arms shouting: HOLY ****!

Well, guess what - it is a fake. Yes, that’s right folks. Step on right up, for I am going to tell you that it is a Gatorade viral video. Bob Garfield from AdvertisingAge, clearly mentioned the following:

The commercial takes us to a Triple A game between the Tacoma Rainiers and Fresno Grizzlies (televised because … well … Fresno). In the action, the Tacoma batter yanks a hanging curveball deep down the left field line. The ball curls foul into the corner and the Fresno leftfielder doesn’t even make a move on it. But then appears the ball girl, who climbs up the wall in two bounds — Jet Li-style — and spins for a leaping catch.

It’s certainly an amazing fabrication of an amazing play. The ball girl is a stuntwoman who was lifted by cables as she planted her feet against the wall, a sequence cut into actual game footage and enhanced with a bit of CGI and a perfectly natural-sounding announcer track. This guy is the quintessential play-by-play man, very much like Bob Carpenter of the Washington Nationals, especially with his postscript as the ball girl resumes her folding chair with the bottle of Gatorade at her feet.

Now that is some viral marketing. Element 79 was commissioned to come up with a brilliant product marketing for Gatorade for which they did an excellent job. In fact, there are thousands of comments sprucing up everywhere saying that “oh, it is possible”, and “yeah, my brother’s friend could two-step that wall” - further cementing an urban legend/belief that the trick can be replicated with the right know-how.

We’ve upgraded our billing management system as well as included a brand new support page. Our ticketing system is now open to the public, so please feel free to use the system to send us a message.

Our support link on our navigation bar has also been updated to point to our ticketing system.

Cheers!

福荣有限责任合伙

Stephen Shankland writes about Google’s Datacenter Infrastructure and what runs the search/advertisement giant. You have to read it for yourself! Its pretty amazing to finally read about Google and how they operate on the backend.

Here are some quotes,

Google doesn’t reveal exactly how many servers it has, but I’d estimate it’s easily in the hundreds of thousands. It puts 40 servers in each rack, Dean said, and by one reckoning, Google has 36 data centers across the globe. With 150 racks per data center, that would mean Google has more than 200,000 servers, and I’d guess it’s far beyond that and growing every day.

In each cluster’s first year, it’s typical that 1,000 individual machine failures will occur; thousands of hard drive failures will occur; one power distribution unit will fail, bringing down 500 to 1,000 machines for about 6 hours; 20 racks will fail, each time causing 40 to 80 machines to vanish from the network; 5 racks will “go wonky,” with half their network packets missing in action; and the cluster will have to be rewired once, affecting 5 percent of the machines at any given moment over a 2-day span, Dean said. And there’s about a 50 percent chance that the cluster will overheat, taking down most of the servers in less than 5 minutes and taking 1 to 2 days to recover.

The MapReduce reliability was severely tested once during a maintenance operation on one cluster with 1,800 servers. Workers unplugged groups of 80 machines at a time, during which the other 1,720 machines would pick up the slack. “It ran a little slowly, but it all completed,” Dean said.

And in a 2004 presentation, Dean said, one system withstood a failure of 1,600 servers in a 1,800-unit cluster.

Well, if that isn’t amazing, I don’t know what is.

Now this is strange though, despite having gone through a fierce battle with ODF and eventually having their standard, OOXML, ratified as a global standard as ISO/IEC 29500, why the turnaround now?

Quoting sniplets from their press release:

The 2007 Microsoft Office system already provides support for 20 different document formats within Microsoft Office Word, Office Excel and Office PowerPoint. With the release of Microsoft Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) scheduled for the first half of 2009, the list will grow to include support for XML Paper Specification (XPS), Portable Document Format (PDF) 1.5, PDF/A and Open Document Format (ODF) v1.1.

Microsoft will join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) technical committee working on the next version of ODF and will take part in the ISO/IEC working group being formed to work on ODF maintenance.

The company will also be an active participant in the ongoing standardization and maintenance activities for XPS and PDF. It will also continue to work with the IT community to promote interoperability between document file formats, including Open XML and ODF, as well as Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY XML), the foundation of the globally accepted DAISY standard for reading and publishing navigable multimedia content.

Why now? Why create a standard and then go the other direction?

Lester & I just came back from Barcamp Singapore II, an event generously organized by the awesome people over at E27, PHP Usergroup as well as Garag3.

Andrew McGlinchey (Geo Product Manager for SE Asia, Google Singapore) started the Unconference by sharing with us the cool things developers have created using the Google Maps API as well as the new features that Google Maps are now sporting.

He also talked briefly on the whole Google Maplets API, and showed us this cool demo of a mash-up of two maplets which allows one to find the nearest hotels based on a street name/area and then calculate the distance between that hotel and any other landmark or position in the map.

Gerald Lim, Chief Technology Officer from Bak2u then proceeded on next, to talk about Mobile Security and why it is so important in today’s day and age.

We then broke into 2 breakout groups, one focusing on Mobile applications and the other on Webapps using Google Map’s API. We decided to attend the mobile application track as we felt that it was more interesting.

Watching all presentations by Widgeo.us, Tencube, MobileSorcery & Cinepura, really got us thinking about how can we push our company one step further. How can we differentiate from the already saturated hosting industry here.

We were really excited about Tencube & Cinepura. Tencube is basically a mobile security company, similar to the Bak2u guys, but we felt that Tencube have a really slick and aesthetically pleasing UI to their web application. Basically, Tencube installs a software on your mobile phone, which you can then control remotely online through their web application. Their service allows you to lock the phone, send out an alarm, backup your contacts, data and relevant information onto their web application and then re-downloads it to a new phone, as well as completely wipeout your phone in the event of theft.

Although there were many physical limitations to their software, like people just doing a hard-reset and having full access to the phone, we thought that the ability to store your phone contacts online and then sync it to another new phone (in the event that the lost phone is no longer recoverable), is something to lookout for.

Cinepura on the other hand is basically a simple web-based application that is optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It allows users to find out Cinema showtimes for the day as well as display IMDB ratings for the movie. So no longer do you have to manually look through the different films on IMDB just to grab the ratings. Everything is sorted by IMDB rating on Cinepura.

I don’t think many people know this, but we at FRRO, are also involved in web-development as well as web-design work. So if you guys have any web development work that needs to get done, drop us an e-mail. We’re available for hire and we do development mainly in PHP/mySQL.

We’d also like to hear comments from you on features or quirks that you think we can improve on or implement on FRRO.

Lets get in touch.

• PHP: 5.2.3 to 5.2.6
• Apache: 2.2.4 to 2.2.8
• ProFTPD: 1.3.1rc3 to 1.3.1
• automake: 1.9.6 to 1.10.1
• libtool: 1.5.24 to 2.2.2
• curl: 7.18.0 to 7.18.1

Tim Johnson, a Product Marketing Manager at Google, had recently introduced a new application called the Google Web Security for Enterprise. Powered by Postini and featuring a jem or two from Scansafe, this software is supposedly able to cater to businesses of all sizes, irregardless of their needs.

Google Web Security for Enterprise protects organizations of all sizes against web malware attacks in real time and enables the safe, productive use of the web, without incurring hardware, upfront capital, or IT management costs. The product enables organizations to control how employees use the Internet, and provides easy-to-use tools to create, enforce, and monitor the right web policy for your organization. Now, through a new add-on feature, we’re extending that security to users wherever they may be working.

Protecting off-network users used to require them to connect via a VPN when they were out of the office — often with mixed results. With this new feature, all off-network users’ web traffic is automatically directed to scanning infrastructure to enforce your policies and protect their computers, requiring no action on the part of individuals. It’s easy to deploy and users can’t tamper with it, ensuring your security and appropriate use policies are always in place.

Here are a few screenshots to pique your curisiousity:

On a hindsight, it will be worthy to note that Postini was snapped up by Google back in Q3 2007 for US$625-million. Here’s the welcome note written by David Girouard on the arrival of Portini aboard the Google vessel.

Welcome to the first episode of TechRepublic’s new weekly video show, Sanity Savers for IT Executives. This show will provide actionable tips for CIOs, IT directors, and other senior IT leaders to help them become more effective leaders, make good technology decisions, align IT and business goals, and better manage their teams of IT professionals. We’ll also provide tips aimed new IT at leaders to help them get a jump on the path to success.

At the same page, there are links to an accompanying article, “10 signs that you aren’t cut out to be a CIO”

Interestingly enough, by a sheer coincidence, we were going through this whole debate about choosing between being a technical specialist/professional and being a manger/CIO in class.

So if you’re in the IT line, this article/videoshow is quite an insightful look into what you should be expecting if you’re looking to take up a managerial position in the IT industry.

tunesBag is a fresh approach to listen to your music anytime and anywhere. Just fire up your browser and indulge in your eclectic music taste – or in those of your friends. Yes, we all love our iPod – but it doesn’t allow for sharing. Not only does music sound better if it’s shared with friends; tunesBag has all the funky bells and whistles that you would expect ‐ plus that extra bit more to make it different.

Founded by 27-year old Hansjörg Posch, tunesBag is currently in closed beta and is free-to-use at the moment. However, there is a chance that it may charge a premium fee once it is opened for public usage. You may want to read up on the development blog, sign up with its Google Group; or simply follow their progress on Twitter.

This is so that they can have better bargaining power at negotiation tables with online music stores like iTunes. In the past, it can be a hassle for online music stores to carry indie music labels’ records as they have to deal with the countless labels individually, creating a large overhead on costs.

Merlin, hopes that by teaming up, they’d be able to sign more deals, on behalf of the thousands of independently owned music labels, with big distributors so that their music can be distributed online and compete on equal ground with the major labels.

Ars.Technica writes that Merlin has already gotten 12,000 labels on board.

From Merlin Network:

Merlin exists because the independents need their own body to ensure their interests are properly represented by an organisation focused wholly on their sector. Independents work in a incredibly competitive environment, ruled by shrinking physical sales, a digital market that is not replacing the fall in revenues, and where independent’s ability to compete is being eroded by the major corporations that dominate the market, from both the supply and retail side.

Merlin is not an aggregator or distributor. Its remit is to represent its members in new media deals that can’t be easily negotiated locally or individually or are not covered adequately by existing arrangements.

Merlin also does not operate in the space occupied by Collecting Societies, rather Merlin aims to address the gap between what these societies are able to offer their members and what labels and aggregators can achieve individually.

Merlin is a stand-alone body and a sister organisation
to the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN).

Not only that, it looks like grassroot activities for independent music labels have been increasing, with the latest one (at least to me) being Slicethepie.com. In the past, musicians have to struggle to raise funds so that they can send their music for recording. With the power of the internet, Slicethepie helps bring the struggle online to a wider audience.

At Slicethepie, artists basically upload demos of their music onto the website and readers of the site basically rate each track. The top 20 rated artists will then move onto a section of the site called Showcase, where fans can help to finance these artists by buying “Backstage Passes”. These “Passes” can then be used to claim a free copy of the album when its recorded.

The cool thing about the site is that, it seems to introduce social lending into the concept of supporting independent artists. Fans can also buy “Contracts” from artists which will entitle them to returns based on the number of singles and albums sold by the artists in a 2 year period.

So if you’re a local artist, why not give it a shot, who knows your bedroom music could just be the next international sensation. I hope as technology grows, the Davids in the music industry will finally be able to take down the Goliaths.

VirtualBox is a virtualization management application that was developed by innotek until Sun Microsystems acquired the software development company in February 2008.

You can read up on the Changelog here. In a nutshell, VirtualBox 1.6’s new highlights include Web service API, a SATA hard disk controller, experimental support for Physical Address Extensions (PAE) and a new guest addition set for the Solaris operating system.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD. Feel free to grab a copy of the application, and do catch up on additional reading while you are waiting for your download to complete.

James Leszczenski had recently announced that Facebook will no longer be continuing its support for Java-based applications. He also added:

While we understand this may have an impact on some developers, we feel that it is most important to keep working on our list of initiatives I referred to before, instead of maintaining an additional client library of which the developer community has already built several unofficial versions.

After this Tuesday’s push, the official Java client library will no longer be available for download from any of the developers pages. We encourage all developers who are interested in continuing to develop in Java to consider some of the open source alternative client libraries listed on the Wiki here. While the official Java library should have no immediate problems with continued use, we nevertheless recommend that you use a client library that is kept up to date, in order to best take advantage of any new functionality that is added in the future.

Here’s a list of alternative platforms that you could work on if you were affected by this announcement:

• ASP.NET
• ASP (VBScript)
• Cocoa
• ColdFusion
• C++
• C#
• D
• Emacs Lisp
• Java
• JavaScript
• Lisp
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby on Rails
• VB.NET
• Windows Mobile

On a hindsight, we would like to take this opportunity to note that we do provide support for Ruby on Rails at FRRO. Inquire us today to find out more.

In all, Elliot Schrage’s impeding departure as Google’s Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs has sent ripples throughout coffee tables at the Silicon Valley. After all, it isn’t the first time that Facebook has managed to coerce Google’s elite to hop over.

So far, the slew of prolific Google employees that moved over to Facebook works out in a list of top flyers that included the likes of:

• Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s ex-Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations
• Gideon Yu, Youtube’s ex-CFO
• Benjamin Ling, Google’s ex-1337 Engineer
• Justin Rosenstein, Google’s ex-Product Manager of Google Pages and ex-GDrive 1337 Developer
• Ethan Beard, Google’s ex-Director of Social Media

Well, the idea of having someone like Elliot Schrage coming aboard with a team of ex-Google seems like a cause for a celebration. That would have been too much excitement to hold back. The following is a leaked memo that Mark Zuckerberg had sent out to the peons at Facebook:

Hey Everyone –

I’m writing from India to share with you the good news that Elliot Schrage will be joining our management team as VP Communications and Public Policy. In this role, he will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do. The goal here is to help people understand how the internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things.

Elliot is joining us from Google where he has been their VP Global Communications and Public Affairs since 2005. At Google, he broadened the company’s messaging from a focus on only product PR to include all aspects of corporate, financial, policy, philanthropic and internal communications. Before that, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a public policy think tank, as a professor at Columbia Business School and as SVP at Gap. Early on, he began his career as a Harvard-trained lawyer.

This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications.

Elliot will be starting on May 14, although you may see him around the office before then.

Nick Gonzalez noted that this ongoing phenomenon have been dubbed as the “Facebook problem”, a term coined by Google’s management at the undeniable exodus of top-ranking executives and engineers leaving for Facebook. It is not surprising to note, however, that Microsoft had once faced a similar situation as Google now did, for which Google had once poached the cream of the crop from Microsoft with the lure of a promising and satisfactory pay job that Microsoft can’t beat.

Could it be the same that Facebook is offering something a million times better than what Google has to offer? Or could it be that the taste of pre-IPO explosion is too much for anybody to miss out on? We all know how awesome the working environment at Google can be but do Facebook have something else that is by far the best ever?

When Erick Schonfeld inquired Ethan Beard about his departure from Google for Facebook, this was the message that he had received (via Facebook):

Yes, I can confirm that I have resigned from Google and will be going to work for Facebook.

I think Facebook is great for a variety of reasons: the company has an innovative product with amazing growth, the team they have assembled is first rate, and the business is at a very exciting time in its development. I am excited to join Facebook at a time and in a role where I can have a significant impact on its core business and bottom line.

Maybe the work environment at Google isn’t “sociable” after all. And that could be the reason why they are moving over.

Or maybe it is the pre-IPO carrot-on-a-stick offer that is too tasty to miss out on.

Do take your time to go through the poll and cast your vote on the choice that you desire.

You can’t find your option slated on the poll? Drop us an email and tell us more about how you feel.