April 27, 2011,
3:37 pm
Facebook Hires Duo Behind Daytum, a Personal Data Site
By
NICK BILTON
Nick Bilton/The New York Times
Nicholas Felton shows off his 2008 annual report.
Facebook has hired the two founders of Daytum, a Web site that offers tools to record personal data and create visualizations from it.
In
a blog post
published Wednesday on Daytum’s Web site, its founders and only employees, Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case, said they were headed to California, where they would join the product design team at Facebook.
Mr. Felton has become somewhat of an Internet celebrity in recent years with his
annual reports
, which track the everyday events in his life. The carefully designed reports offer visual representations of things like the number of beverages he consumed in the previous year and the distance he traveled.
Daytum was started last year with the goal of offering an “elegant and intuitive tool for counting and communicating personal statistics.” People who use the site tend to track things like exercise, food and sleep habits. The Daytum site will continue to operate.
In the blog post announcing the acquisition, the co-founders said they were?”excited to start the next chapter, working with the rest of the design team at Facebook to help people express themselves and share experiences with friends.”
Facebook has hired several well-known designers in the past, including
Lee Byron
, who?
released a project
in 2009 that used Facebook data to track when people broke up with a?significant?other. It also highlighted the most cited reasons for a split. Mr. Byron previously worked at The New York Times.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: April 27, 2011
Clarifying that Facebook is hiring the founders of Daytum, not buying the site.