Facebook to Open Office Near Harvard campus

(AP) Facebook to open office near Harvard campus
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.
Facebook confirmed Thursday that it is opening a Boston-area office in suburban Cambridge, just a couple of miles from where the website was founded in Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room.

The announcement came almost a year and a half after a top Massachusetts politician asked the social media giant to relocate to the state where the seeds of company were first sown. Facebook’s headquarters is in Menlo Park, Calif.

The team will focus on infrastructure projects in areas including storage, networking, security, and language runtimes.

Mack and a couple of other Facebook employees have been in the Boston area for a couple of years, working “from a series of coffee shops, libraries, and co-working spaces,” including a basement in Chinatown, he said.

Mack is an infrastructure engineer who played key roles in the development of Facebook’s Timeline and Photos projects.

Massachusetts House Speaker Robert DeLeo welcomed the news.

DeLeo, a Democrat from Winthrop, outside Boston, wrote an open letter to Zuckerberg in May 2012, asking him to return to Massachusetts, citing the state’s tech-friendly business environment and financial health.

Facebook has about 1.2 billion users worldwide.