Mike Schroepfer, Vice President of Engineering at Facebook, spoke with Jason Kincaid at this morning's TechCrunch Disrupt conference. The topic of the conversation focused on many of Facebook's newest features, including the recently launched Friend Lists and "Subscribe" option, which lets users follow others' public updates in a model very similar to Twitter and Google+.

This led, of course, to a discussion of how much "inspiration" Facebook drew from other sites. Is Google+ now influencing Fa [...]

Read More: Is Facebook Copying Google+ And Twitter? VP Of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer, Responds

Sharing and discovery platform Bagcheck is now in the bag at Twitter, as the microblogging service announced its acquisition of the company and the addition of Bagcheck co-founder Sam Pullara to its engineering team.

Read More: Twitter Bags Bagcheck, Co-Founder Sam Pullara Joins Engineering Team

Many people are aware of Google’s "20 percent time," and the number of innovations that have been produced because of it (Gmail, Google News, and AdSense for Content to name a few). Several other companies have tried this before and after Google; one of the most famous examples of side-project innovation is 3M’s Post it [...]

Read More: Stop, collaborate and innovate: Engineering a company science fair

Groupon, the largest daily deals shopping network, announced late last week that they have officially acquired Obtiva, a Chicago-based Ruby on Rails software development firm. Rails was created in 2003 by David Heinemeier Hansson and has since expanded in excess of 1,800 contributors by the Rails core team.


Read More: Groupon Acquires Obtiva to Build Up Engineering Team