Facebook has tapped the former chief of Google’s Allo and Duo services, Amit Fulay, as its new head of product. Fulay announced his transition to the social networking giant via his Twitter account, marking a culmination of his more than seven years of service at the Mountain View, California-based company. At Google, Fulay served as the lead for real time communications products from August 2010, overseeing a variety of solutions including Allo, Duo, Hangouts, and WebRTC, among others. It remains unclear what Fulay’s responsibility will be at Facebook, though the social networking site is expected to issue an official announcement over the next few days. For its part, Google has also yet to announce its new head of product, with the search giant likely to shed light on the matter shortly.
While working at Google, Fulay made several contributions to the development of various products under his oversight. In June last year, Fulay announced an update to Google Allo that would allow users to make calls using Google Duo right from their chats, adding that Google Allo would also begin letting users to put stickers on their photos shared with others while inside an Allo chat. Several weeks later, Fulay took to his Twitter account again to announce that Allo was coming to desktop PCs. In May last year, Fulay also revealed the addition of chat backup, link preview and group incognito mode to the messaging service. The backup feature was meant to help users restore messages on Allo when necessary. The link preview feature was designed to allow users to view a glimpse of a link when it’s pasted in a chat.
Prior to joining Google, Fulay served as director of product management at Jambool, the company behind Social Gold which the search giant acquired in 2010. For the uninitiated, Social Gold is a virtual economy platform that provides a method for monetizing social network applications. Before that, he was a senior lead program manager for cloud services at Microsoft Corporation from January 2009 to January 2010. Earlier in his career with the software titan, Fulay also served as a lead program manager for Microsoft adCenter between February 2007 to and December 2008, according to his LinkedIn profile.