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Report: Ben Ling's going back to the Googleplex

Benjamin Ling, the former Googler who was hired by Facebook last year and sparked a barrage of blog speculation about Google employees moving on to the next cool company, may be going back to Mountain View. Earlier this week, Facebook confirmed that he was indeed leaving the company.

Valleywag reported on Thursday that Ling had been spotted at the Googleplex, and the Gossip Girl-ish nature of that post was backed up by a report from Kara Swisher that she'd heard he'd be returning to Google to work on YouTube. More specifically, he was re-hired to help monetize the … Read more

Another exec leaving Facebook

Benjamin Ling, who was recruited from Google to lead Facebook's developer platform product marketing team, plans to leave his job at the social-networking site, the fourth key executive to depart in recent months.

Ling's departure, which was reported by VentureBeat's Eric Eldon and BoomTown's Kara Swisher, was confirmed by Facebook in a statement Tuesday.

At the Graphing Social Patterns: East conference in June, Ling confirmed that Facebook would be launching a widely rumored payment system for application developers, but declined to provide a time frame at the conference. Before joining Facebook last fall, Ling was the … Read more

Graphing Social Patterns: Facebook aspires to the frictionless platform

Ben Ling, director of product marketing for the Facebook platform, gave a brief peek of the upcoming profile page update and outlined Facebook's vision at Graphing Social Patterns conference. The new profile page will combine the Wall and Minifeed, and additional tabs have been added to showcase users' favorite apps.

Ling said that Facebook has 200,000 developers and 16,000 applications so far. Of the 66 million current Facebook users, 98 percent have used at least one third-party application, and a significant number use six or seven applications, he said.

Ling described Facebook's vision as making its … Read more