Today was my last day at Facebook. Normally when I leave a job I go out cursing the management and wishing I had left much sooner. In the case of Facebook, I sent heartfelt emails to all of my managers thanking them for the privilege of letting me work there, and I genuinely meant it. Facebook was the longest I ever worked at one company, and the best employer I’ve ever had.

Working at Facebook was like having my own startup, but with a paycheck instead of ramen. Management gave me the freedom to work on my own ideas, and just like with real startups, some of my projects never made it out of the lab, while others shipped and were huge successes. The brilliance of Facebook management is encouraging everyone to take initiative, take risks, and wear as many hats as you can. I wish more tech companies operated like this.

Having known Hewitt for a while, I can safely say that he means every single word. Not one to give lip service, Hewitt is a straight shooter. He joined Facebook after Mark Zuckerberg & Co acquired Parakey, a company Hewitt co-founded with Blake Ross about four years ago. Hewitt’s contributions to the mobile ecosystem, including his work on Facebook for iPhone, was the main reason we included him the inaugural GigaOM Mobile Influencers list. Here is what we wrote about him:

In the world of software, there are few who qualify for rock star status. But Joe Hewitt, a New Jersey-born programmer, is one of them. He started out at Netscape in 2000, working on the browser’s user interface, after which he went on to help longtime cohort Blake Ross reinvent the Netscape browser as Mozilla’s Firefox. In 2006 he left Mozilla to work with Ross on a new startup, Parakey, that in turn was acquired by Facebook in 2007.

Then when Apple launched the iPhone, Hewitt released iUI, a user interface library that consisted of a combination of javascript and CSS, and allowed for the easy development of web applications that matched the device’s native visual elements. Later he wrote an iPhone-specific version of Facebook, which has helped to both take the social network to the top of the mobile heap and jumpstarted the adoption of social networking services on all major mobile phone platforms. What’s even more surprising: Hewitt is the one-man programming machine behind Facebook for the iPhone.

After spending his energies on the iPhone, he moved away from Apple’s platform and turned his attention to the Android platform. Today Facebook is a mobile monster, possibly working on its own mobile platform. Hewitt says he is going to work on new tools for developers and designers. On his blog, he wrote:

And so, I’m independent now, and I’m going to pour myself into understanding the needs of modern developers and designers, and creating software to fill those needs. There are so many opportunities that I can’t even predict what I will end up building, but I am pretty sure I know where I am going to start. I can’t wait.

Here is a video interview I did with Hewitt back in 2009:

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This post originally appeared on Joe Hewitt’s blog. He truly does capture the essence of the iPad in this piece — I couldn’t have said it better. I was so blown away that I asked him if we could republish it and share it with our readers, which he very kindly agreed to let us do. Enjoy…Om

Most of the iPad reactions I’ve read have been negative, but I have been completely satisfied with what Apple announced. iPad is exactly the product I’ve been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints.

While the rumor mill was churning with all kinds of crazy possibilities for the Apple tablet, I mostly rolled my eyes, because I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen. Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn’t understand how much of the iPhone OS’s potential is still untapped.

I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complex social networking website into a handheld, touch-screen form factor. My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.com mothership, but once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! Of all the platforms I’ve developed on in my career, from the desktop to the web, iPhone OS gave me the greatest sense of empowerment, and had the highest ceiling for raising the art of UI design. Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small.

At some point I came to the conclusion that Facebook on iPhone OS could not truly exceed the website until I could adapt it to a screen size closer to a laptop. It needed to support more than one column of information at a time. I couldn’t fit enough tools on the screen to support any kind of advanced creative work. Photos were too small to show off to my far-sighted parents. The web required too much panning and zooming to enjoy reading. Beyond just Facebook, most of the apps I used most on my iPhone also suffered from these limitations, like Google Reader, Instapaper, and all image, video, and text editing tools. The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.

Opportunity

iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you’re not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.

True, iPad 1.0 has a lot of limitations which make it hard to be compared to a laptop today. We’re not there yet, people, but does it really take that much imagination to see how we will get there? Apple clearly wants to increase its investment in iPhone OS and reduce its investment in Mac OS X. At some point in the near future, Apple will adapt iPhone OS to even larger screens, add multi-tasking, and release something like a laptop or iMac with the OS. When it happens, it will make perfect sense, because by then there will be orders of magnitude more iPhone/iPad apps on the App Store than there ever were for Mac OS X and Windows.

A Closed Platform?

Given my concerns about the way Apple runs the App Store, you might expect me to jump on the bandwagon screaming about how Apple is evil and iPad is the death of open computing. Nonsense. My only problem with Apple is the fact that they insist on pre-approving every app on the App Store. The store may not be open, but the iPhone/iPad platform itself could hardly be more open to tinkerers of all ages.

The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.

As a developer, it’s a bit sad losing the ability to come up with crazy plugins and daemons and system-level utilities, but I believe it’s a tradeoff worth making. What people are overlooking is that the Internet is an integral part of the iPhone OS, and it is the part of the OS you can tinker with to your heart’s delight. If you want to invent a new scripting language or background service or something, you’re still totally free to do that, but you’re going to have to run it on a web server. If you want total freedom on the client side, then write a web app. You’re simply no longer going to be able to tempt users into installing software that corrupts their computer.

So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers new metaphors that will let users engage with their computers with dramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense of power and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the software market feel wide open again, like no one’s hegemony is safe. How anyone can feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.

Joe Hewitt is a software developer who lives in Santa Cruz, Calif., and his accomplishments include Facebook for iPhone, Firebug, iUI, and early Firefox.

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Facebook for the iPhone is one of my most used applications, and I’m not alone as it’s amongst the most popular iPhone applications ever. This success is due to the size of Facebook itself, that the application is free, and that it is very well done. That last is due mainly to Joe Hewitt, who has been the main developer for Facebook’s iPhone application. Unfortunately that’s about to change, as Hewitt tweeted that he is moving “…onto a new project.”

At face value this may not be of any importance beyond a certain sadness to see a great developer leave a platform and an application so many love. In a conversation with TechCrunch, however, Hewitt made clear that the principal reason behind his departure from this project is his unhappiness with Apple’s management of the iPhone app store. Hewitt specifically mentions his philosophical opposition to the review process, indicating that it puts an unnecessary middleman between developers and users. He also fears that it sets a dangerous precedent for other platforms. Hewitt will be moving onto a web project at Facebook, which offers the opportunity to work on an open platform.

Hewitt is not the first developer to abandon the iPhone due to Apple’s perceived mismanagement of the app store, but he may be the highest profile. His departure from iPhone development highlights a critical danger that Apple faces with the app store. For a variety of reasons, ranging from an inability to get your application noticed, the danger of having your application rejected for unforeseen reasons and the very low prices charged on the app store, many developers are growing disillusioned with the iPhone as a platform.

If this trend reaches a critical level it could deal a blow to the iPhone, which has touted the wide variety of high quality applications in its marketing. Even more dangerous is the possibility that developers will move in large numbers to other platforms, with Android being the most likely option. Of course Android has its own problems related to app development, and there are still plenty of developers who are focusing on the iPhone as their principal mobile platform.

It may be, however, that Apple is offering its competitors an opening to create a much more developer-friendly environment and steal one of its key advantages: the quality, not the quantity, of applications available. If Android, BlackBerry or Symbian can attract top developers to produce 1,000 high quality applications for its platform, that will probably be enough to erase the huge lead Apple has today. Who cares if you can’t choose between 500 tip calculators, or 30 different versions of the same public domain book as long as you can get high quality versions of the apps you actually want?

It’s clear that Apple realizes there are problems with the way it is currently managing the app store. The question is whether it can make the necessary adjustments to attract and keep the best developers for the iPhone, or if the Joe Hewitt’s of the world decide it’s just not worth their time.

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Joe was named to GigaOM’s Top 15 Mobile Influencers list earlier this year for his contributions to the iPhone app ecosystem — in particular, for single-handedly turning Facebook into a major force on the iconic Apple device. I recently gave him a hard time over the delays in launching Facebook 3.0, which prompted Joe to stop by our office and take part in an impromptu video chat. Here are the excerpts from that conversation.

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Facebook 3.0 for iPhone Screenshot courtesy of Facebook

Updated: On August 17, Facebook let us know that it had submitted the 3.0 version of its app to the Apple store.

Where is the newest version of Facebook’s iPhone 3.0 application? Being a fan of the app -– which I now use on my iPod Touch -– I was thrilled to hear that a new version with some snazzy new features was going to launch. After all, great as the current version might be, it still lacks certain features and could use a “user experience” facelift.  But now six weeks have gone by, and still nothing.

One of the main developers of the application, Joe Hewitt, said on July 1 that he was nearly finished building the application. “I can’t predict an exact date when I will submit to Apple, but I can say that I am about 98% done,” he wrote in the blog post.

Facebook for iPhone is one of the best applications for that platform. According to the Palo Alto, Calif.-based social networking company, there are some 30 million people who use Facebook Mobile. And it plans to reveal in September new mobile user data that’s said to put that figure much higher. Which ties in with an argument we made earlier this year: Facebook’s future is mobile. As we explained, the reasons are simple: “Facebook has all along said it wants to mirror real-world relationships,” wrote Liz Gannes. “When you throw mobile into the mix, there’s no reason to even have to separate so-called offline and online contacts.”

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