If Facebook ads are any indicator of the health of the economy then it must be great. For the past 2-3 months I have noticed an increase in the number of job ads. I think the cause might be one or a combination of the following:

• More employers are using Facebook to advertise open positions which could mean the economy is doing better. Yay!
• I switched jobs from a Visual Studio SDET to Bing Mobile SDE back in October. The “developer” label probably draws more employer attention than the “tester” label.
• The Microsoft keyword in my profile certainly helps. It’s like going to a big name school. Society assumes it must be good. In the big scheme of things it’s pretty silly to base potential success off of that attribute alone.

Here are some of the job ads I have seen so far: Various social game sites like and - they advertise using the domain which appears to be their informational recruiting site.

It’s not uncommon for 2 or 3 of these to show up on any given Facebook page. The Marchex ad always catches my eye. Their tag line reads: “Tired of Reorgs.” Which probably catches the attention of most Microsoft employees. I think ads on Facebook are going to start to look more and more like this though. They will continue to get more personal in nature. I know I click on more Facebook ads than Google ads. When something is so relavent it sparks my curiosity. I don’t know that Facebook will take away Google’s AdWord revenue but I think they are in a pretty good position to compete for AdSense revenue. IMDB.com also advertises positions on Facebook. They didn’t take the “reorg” approach but went with the commute. The 520 bridge which connects Seattle to Microsoft can get backed up. Personally, I am not “tired of the bridge” as their ad said since I don’t live in Seattle. Their ad was clever but not clever enough to take my address into account. Finally, the last ad that caught my eye had the tag line: “Stressed At Microsoft?” The ad was for counseling services at . Between the competitor’s job ads and counseling ads a cynic might say Microsoft isn’t the place to work. I wonder what kind of targeted ads I would see if I worked at Google, Amazon, Facebook or Apple? For Amazon I am guessing “Tired of the Pager” would make a pretty catchy tag line. I am sure the others have quirks their competitors use to attract talent but I don’t know enough about those companies to venture a guess.

For my next side project I am going to create a webapp that allows site maintainers to track what a user is doing with the UI of their site and view this in realtime. My plan is to record things like mouse position, window size and page content and push it all back to the server. It can be a poor man's usability study or simply used as a big brother tool by site maintainers. Either way it should be interesting.

Last month I created Tetris with Twilio. It allows any telephone (USA only) to be used as an input device to a game of tetris that is played within a web browser. The best part is that once you clear 5 lines your phone is redirected to me and I'll probably pick up and talk to you.

How does it work? I use http://www.twilio.com/ to deal with input from the phone. The main purpose of this project was to learn more about http://www.tornadoweb.org/. Tornado makes it easy to push data to the user in realtime. And for those that like source code it is available here.

Enjoy!