Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of the PHP programming language, confirms he is leaving the company. "It has only been a couple of days," he told us by email yesterday. "I really don't know what is next yet... I am enjoying having a bit more time to play with pet projects this week."

Lerdorf, whose widely-used programming and templating system has been especially popular among Web startups, declined to elaborate on why he left Yahoo. But he was blunt about the matter on Twitter this past summer, just moments after Yahoo announced a pact in which Microsoft would power its search results — previously handled by in-house code — while Yahoo would continue to sell ads against the results:

If we had to guess where Lerdorf might end up, we'd lay our money on Facebook, a PHP shop and a fast-growing one at that. The massive social network has no doubt pushed Lerdorf's language to the edges of its performance envelope. More importantly, the young company shows no inclination to outsource software development to one of its largest competitors and turn itself into a second-tier advertising network.

(Pic by Aaron Hockley)

Quantcast (Reddit is the lower line; news ranking competitor Digg the upper):

ComScore, via TechCrunch (Reddit is the lower, red line):

The departures of Ohanian and Huffman were anticipated. The co-founders are believed to have completed the "earn out" provisions of their acquisition deal with Condé Nast; the end of October marks the three-year anniversary of the acquisition. What's troubling is that Wired, socked by layoffs and ad declines, seems determined to do to promising Wired.com what it did to Reddit: hinder some real potential.

No matter, for Reddit's co-founders: Alexis Ohanian (top pic, left) is off to a fellowship in Armenia, while co-founder Steve Huffman (top pic, right) will "flee back to Virginia to spend time with my lovely new wife." Sounds like a plan. They'll say goodbye at a Reddit Halloween party in San Francisco. Free drinks are involved — per Reddit tradition — so.... see you there!

(Top pics: Irina Slutsky and saikofish on Flickr)

Wired.com managing editor Marty Cortinas and copy chief Tony Long were laid off last week, sources tell us, though it's expected the two will stay on through the end of the year. The loss of two people, even high ranking ones, might not seem too brutal but for the website's recent history: it lost a quarter of its staff last November, along with a closely-aligned development executive at parent company CondéNet; then in April it lost more staff, including managing editor Leander Kahney, two other full-time employees, an unknown number of freelancers and several writers at Wired Digital's Ars Technica website.

On top of that, people close to the company whisper that the two founders of social news website Reddit, and potentially other staff, may soon be out the Wired door. Co-founder Alexis Ohanian is planning a celebration to take place on the third anniversary of the site's acquisition by Wired Digital on Oct. 31. And there's reason to think this will be more jovial than your typical Halloween party: Three years is a typical outer limit used in "earn out" agreements, in which startup founders vest progressively more money from their acquirers as time goes on. This gives them incentive to integrate their creation into the acquiring company rather than bolting for the door. Ohanian, believed to be hitting his final earn-out date along with co-founder Steve Huffman, declined to comment.

Of course, there's nothing unusual about entrepreneurial Silicon Valley programmers moving on to new challenges. Reddit would likely continue operating just fine without Ohanian and Huffman. And Wired.com marches forward under editor Evan Hansen.

But it's not lost on some Wired.com insiders that the further reduction of Wired Digital comes as New York-based parent company Condé Nast clings to a magazine-centric business model that's been a real disaster lately. After hiring McKinsey & Company's consultants, Condé closed four magazines and slashed magazine budgets, by 25 percent at many titles. And while Wired Digital's already-bled websites and blogs may have strong traffic, advertising and critical notice — they were recently nominated alongside the Washington Post, BBC and New York Times for the Online News Association's general excellence award — they've been included in the cuts.

So how is Condé expecting to survive the next big tumble in magazine advertising, if not with its websites? Through the vision of print side editors like Wired's Chris Anderson, who seems, to some Condé Nasties at least,to have spent so much time on books and speaking gigs he's forgotten to help sell ads — or to try and truly integrate his magazine with his website? Anderson's ad-hemorrhaging Wired print, mind you, has thus far escaped unscathed by the McKinsey cutbacks, we're reliably informed. Despite his good fortune, Anderson is even rumored to be advocating that Wired.com get by on more crowdsourced, written-for-Free blogs like GeekDad. Asked about this, Anderson wrote, "Evan Hansen runs Wired.com, not me." Hansen declined to be interviewed.

Or maybe the Apple Tablet, Microsoft Courier and Amazon Kindle, among other e-readers, will miraculously allow Condé Nast's old business model to seamlessly transition to the digital age, with no real internal changes necessary.

That might all sound preposterous. But it's the best rationale we've come up with for why Condé Nast would starve key websites — the best hope for its future, really — of resources. Granted, it's much easier to remain in a state of denial than to confront real and looming problems. But we thought Condé might have already hit rock bottom and changed its thinking. Apparently not.

(Pics: Josh Russell, Mat Honan and Roo Reynolds on Flickr.)

In her job promoting YouTube to corporations, Kovner did get some camera time, like in the video attached to this post by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. And the former Yale cheerleader was presumably able to spread some of her inner joy while attending various events around town. But Google did not afford Kovner any chance to indulge her longtime passion for singing — until now.

There's no word yet on whether the marketer/vocalist's new gig at AOL might allow for a few choice solos. But if not, Kristin, we have just one word for you: Broadway.

Kovner's goodbye video is above, and her goodbye email follows below.

Morgan joined HuffPo in October 2007 after working as general manager at CBSNews.com. As CEO, she served on the HuffPo board along with Hippeau, Arianna Huffington, co-founder Kenneth Lerer and Fred Harman of Oak Investment Partners, which in December put $25 million into the internet publication.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.That deal converted HuffPo's election buzz and traffic into dollars, signaling that the publication was entering the media big leagues. Another key development was an investigative reporting grant, accompanied by the influx of veteran editors from other publications, including one from the Washington Post.

It's been unclear whether the recent growth was compatible with founder Huffington's often volatile and always idiosyncratic management style; today's turnover could be a sign that HuffPo's investors demanded closer supervision — or, less climactically, simply wanted Morgan out.

UPDATE: HuffPo confirms, in a statement that pointedly notes, "The Huffington Post co-founders Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer made the announcement" of Morgan's departure and not, say, Softbank. Morgan, meanwhile, pointedly notes that she's leaving with some shares of the company.

Huffington's quote:

Having worked closely with [Hippeau] for the last three years, I know firsthand what an invaluable asset he has been in our expansion. And now, given his impressive background in the industry and his intimate knowledge of HuffPost, Eric is uniquely able to hit the ground running as the company takes its expansion to the next level.

Hippeau was CEO of tech publisher Ziff Davis from 1989-2000 and serves on the board of Yahoo. At Softbank, he's a managing partner.

(Pic: Top via PaidContent, bottom via TechCrunch)

One of those is Cal Henderson, Flickr's longtime director of engineering (left). AllThingsD's Kara Swisher reports that he's left Flickr and is working on a startup with Flickr cofounder Stewart Butterfield, who quit Yahoo with a bizarre resignation letter last year.

That's not all he's up to: We hear he spoke at some length with a Google recruiter at a party Saturday night. In an IM conversation, Henderson admitted he went to a party "with some folks from Six Apart [the blog-software company] and Flickr," but denied he'd spoken to anyone from Google.

Google's interest in Flickr's people is of long standing. Before Yahoo bought Flickr in 2005, Butterfield and his cofounder, then-wife Caterina Fake, flirted seriously with selling to Google. (In the small-world department: Megan Smith, the Google executive who championed a purchase of Flickr, is married to Swisher, the blogger who broke the news of Henderson and Butterfield's new startup.)

So if Google can't have Flickr, why not have its best people? No surprise that they're talking — and no surprise that Henderson's playing hard to get.

The official story will be that Jon Miller, the new broom from AOL, has swept aside MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and his team. But as always, Murdoch alone rules News Corp. And the decision must have been his.

Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, is the chair of MySpace China, and that professional relationship has spurred dangerous gossip which can't have helped DeWolfe's standing.

Four years after he bought MySpace, Murdoch has finally rid MySpace of the spammers and scammers who launched it. It is far past time — and yet probably the right moment. Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin's book, Stealing MySpace, has exposed MySpace's roots in porn, spam, and hacking. As the economic tide that boosted MySpace's advertising sales has receded, DeWolfe has been shown to be swimming naked. And Miller, as News Corp.'s newest Internet executive and the latest to have won Murdoch's ear, is in prime position to push out DeWolfe, whose contract expires this fall. (Just one question: If DeWolfe sidekick Tom Anderson is ousted, who will become every MySpace user's default first friend?)

DeWolfe always seemed more interested in throwing parties and dating celebrities than solving MySpace's hard problems. Growth has stagnated for the past year as Facebook has surged. The site's interface remains a shambolic wreck which fails at the most basic tasks, like remembering a user's login. Talented engineers, including COO Amit Kapur, have defected. Slingshot Labs, a MySpace spinoff meant to foster Silicon Valley-style innovation, is an industry laughingstock for launching a me-too celebrity gossip site rather than chasing genuinely new technologies. Given all this, it's possible that DeWolfe's friendship with Deng was the only thing that helped him last so long.

What now for the site? News Corp. is reportedly recruiting a new CEO already. Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta would be an excellent choice, if he can be wrested away from the music startup he's currently running. Or the company might place an internal candidate from the News Corp. empire, to provide the closer eye MySpace has long needed.

Ah, but those are tiresomely sensible choices. Here are two that would maximize the Murdoch family drama everyone loves: Install prodigal son Lachlan Murdoch. Or put Deng in charge.

Now the word is Koten may be out, too — not just of his office, but his job, too. When asked, Koten said he "planned on appearing for jury duty tomorrow." To avoid a leak, we hear managers are calling employees with the news that Mansueto Ventures CFO Mark Rosenberg is taking over temporarily. But we suspect Koten, a fan of both the B-52s and Aristotle's Rhetoric, is happiest while at sea.

After a late-night email sent by Koten urging his employees to interview him to "show some respect" got leaked earlier this month, Koten "had his assistants move all of his stuff into a cubicle outside his office," the tipster told us. Joe Mansueto, the founder of mutual-fund research firm Morningstar and owner of Fast Company and Inc., works from a cubicle. "After several years of working out of an office now seems a really weird time to become "a man of the people,'" our tipster notes.

Koten has an erratic reputation. One media veteran familiar with his career calls him "one of the unheralded geniuses of the magazine business" but also the "laziest man in the world." Legend has it that the devoted sailor once turned down a promotion at the Wall Street Journal that would have had him move from Chicago to New York because of the cost of berthing his boat. (He later made the move, and recently invited Mansueto Ventures employees to bring their children on board his boat for Take Your Children to Work Day.)

Media Business hailed him as one of the top innovators in the magazine business for FastCompany.com and FastCompany.tv. But the architect of those websites, Ed Sussman, was fired in October. FastCompany.tv star Robert Scoble inexplicably lasted through March, despite spending more of his time Twittering than videoblogging. Perhaps Fast Company can bring him back to do a remake of "I'm On a Boat"?

(Photo by rexhammock)

Kordestani was Google's first moneyman, the company's so-called "business founder." He is taking the role of an advisor to Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This semi-retirement is understandable; even after an expensive divorce and the decline in Google shares, he is still worth $1.4 billion, the result of his well-timed jump to Google when it was a fledgling startup.

Like any good salesman, Kordestani has a talent for following the money. Is it that same sense of timing that is leading him to leave now, while Google could still report one decent quarter of earnings?

Here's how the release puts it:

Recent Developments – After ten years of building and managing our global sales and partnership operations, Omid Kordestani has decided to hand over the reins to Nikesh Arora, currently President of International Operations, and take on a new role as Senior Advisor, Office of the CEO and Founders. Continued growth is essential to our future success and no one is better placed to advise on new revenue opportunities than Omid, the business founder of Google. In his new role as President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development, Nikesh Arora will have responsibility for all Google's revenue and customer operations, as well as marketing and partnerships. He has a proven track record at Google, having spent the last four and a half years building our European operations into a substantial business.

(Photo by John D. McHugh/AFP/Getty Images)

After Yu left abruptly, CEO Mark Zuckerberg trotted out the tired time-with-family cliché to explain his departure. But in the case of Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya, the cliché seems to be literally true, and the departure temporary. Sort of. Palihapitiya, a former AOL executive who now heads Facebook's growth initiatives, has said he plans to leave the company altogether, but was persuaded to take a four-month paternity leave instead.

A less likely rumor we've heard: That COO Sheryl Sandberg has been issuing ultimatums, that either she goes or Zuckerberg. That doesn't square with Sandberg's style. She's an experienced Washington operative and former Google executive who always works behind the scenes to get what she wants. But she does have ties to Facebook investors, including venture-capital firm Accel Partners and Elevation Partners' Marc Bodnick, who happens to be her brother-in-law. Could she quietly be spreading the word that it's time for Zuckerberg to go? And if Zuckerberg gets wind of her efforts, could her time be up?

It's not clear why Yu is leaving now. He raised nearly $500 million for the company, and was looking for more. But a few things are known: Zuckerberg has repeatedly said that the company's focus is on growth rather than making money. He has made a habit of quickly cycling through executives. Former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta, who left after an apparent demotion, is a notable example.

The question is who's next? Jonathan Heiliger, a dotcom-era Internet wunderkind now in charge of Facebook's vast technical infrastructure, has long been said to be restive. COO Sheryl Sandberg, the Google veteran splashily hired last year, might be called to account if Facebook's sales don't catch up with its user growth. As the door to Facebook's executive suite keeps swinging, it seems like only a matter of time before people start asking questions about the prickly, isolated 24-year-old at the top.

Since assuming leadership of the consumer web team, I started attending the legendary weekly UI review meeting. I did this both as a representative of the web group, and also to help keep my team on track with what Marissa and her team expected of us. By this point in my career I had worked with her many, many times, and I had been attending the review regularly for a couple of months. She had even shaken my hand once to thank me for launching a particularly big and difficult campaign.
One of the last times I sat in that meeting, as we were dispersing, she looked right at me and asked her assistant to "cut down on the number of guests - there are too many random people here." I knew then that despite all the work I had done for her team, she didn't recognize me at all. I had earned no influence. I stopped going to the reviews after that.
A few weeks later, after thinking about my experiences and opportunities there, I decided to resign.

Halsall then calls for a change in Google's "creative leadership" — a veiled way of asking for Mayer's head on a platter.

Her tale comes after Doug Bowman, Google's top designer, criticized Google's obsession with numbers in making design decisions, a strategy advanced by Mayer. Another former designer, Kevin Fox, now at a startup called FriendFeed, doesn't wholly agree with Bowman — but notes that Google's design group has "had a glass ceiling from the very beginning." That, too, seems like a veiled reference to Mayer's iron grip on the look and feel of Google's consumer Web products. It doesn't take a degree in visual design to notice a pattern here.

Bowman joined Google three years ago — too late, he now says. The company's engineers-first culture was firmly in place, meaning every decision had to be proven through exhaustive testing, rather than a reliance on a clear vision of Google's design. And in a backhanded slam at Google VP Marissa Mayer, the head of "user experience," he notes that top management in charge of design had not background in the field:

When a company is filled with engineers, it turns to engineering to solve problems. Reduce each decision to a simple logic problem. Remove all subjectivity and just look at the data. Data in your favor? Ok, launch it. Data shows negative effects? Back to the drawing board. And that data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions.


Yes, it's true that a team at Google couldn't decide between two blues, so they're testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that. I've grown tired of debating such miniscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.

Exciting design problems, like those at Twitter? A source tells us that's where he's going, but Bowman hasn't confirmed that yet. (He promises to disclose his new employer in a followup blog post.)

Bowman adds that he "can't fault Google for this reliance on data," but "won't miss a design philosophy that lives or dies strictly by the sword of data." It's a microcosm of what's going wrong at Google: The rigorous culture of making every decision quantitative, every process algorithmic, results in a coldly efficient experience, with no room for the human quirkiness that makes sites like Flickr so appealing. It's hard to argue with Google's financial results. But who wants to work inside the bowels of a perfectly tuned machine? If Google runs by the numbers, it hardly needs humans. And that's why people like Bowman are leaving.

(Photo by gorriti)

Falco and Grant were almost instantly hated when they arrived at AOL's Dulles campus — partly because Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes badly mishandled the exit of former CEO Jonathan Miller. (Miller is now a venture capitalist, and both his name and Armstrong's came up as candidates in Yahoo's CEO search.)

Armstrong, head of Google's North American ad sales, seems like the best possible man for the job — and with Google's shares hovering around $323, down more than 50 percent from their peak, and AOL at the nadir of its tumultuous existence, it seems like a good time for him to prove what he can do.

He benefits from an easy comparison: Falco's reign at AOL, where the company's notional value sank from $20 billion to a fraction of that, will go down in history as one of the worst reigns as CEO at any company, anywhere.

But what is Armstrong going to do? He'd never have left his cozy perch at Google to oversee AOL's further decline. Let's assume that's not in the cards.

The best indicator of Armstrong's preferred strategy is not the one he pursued at Google. Based primarily in New York, Armstrong oversaw an agenda set by the geeks in Mountain View. To keep him on board, Google's top managers allowed Armstrong use his Google-IPO wealth to make several startup investments on the side, even when they posed a conflict of interest.

One company, Associated Content, run by Armstrong's college roommate Luke Beatty, lets amateur publishers post content on the Web and get paid a share of the advertising revenues. Another, Patch, is building local news sites with real journalists behind them, in competition with the New York Times.

It's not clear if Time Warner, which is stricter about this kind of thing, will let Armstrong stay involved with his side gigs. But what they spell out is a guy who's itching to be a media kingpin, not the boss of an army of programmers.

What that likely means: The future of AOL will rest in its blog-heavy MediaGlow division, while Armstrong works his Madison Avenue connections to rebuild AOL's slouching ad sales. If he makes it work, it will be a triumph over his old bosses at Google — the ones who believe in the alchemy of algorithms over the hard work of creating content that attracts an audience.

Rose is a geek hero, famous first for his stint hosting a tech-focused TV show on Comcast's G4TV. Diggnation, an online video show where Rose and Albrecht drink beer and discuss popular headlines on Digg, Rose's social-news site, is the centerpiece of Revision3, Rose's online-video startup. Appearing on broadcast TV, though, is a high-water mark for this icon of geek culture.

While Rose has a burgeoning mini-media empire which has won him magazine covers, Albrecht has languished in relative obscurity — the "blond guy," as Fallon called him.

Which is why when we heard that Albrecht wanted out of his contract, we didn't dismiss the rumor out of hand. As lucrative as the Diggnation gig must be for what is, let's be honest, an excuse to drink in front of a camera, Albrecht could well be frustrated at being Rose's sidekick. (The job does have one perk, though: The ability to say scathing things about Rose and get away with it. Rose is a famously prolific dater whose brief entanglements have included egoblogger Julia Allison and L.A. TV personality Shira Lazar. Albrecht's comment at a party: Rose "has basically plowed through everybody.")

We asked Revision3 CEO Jim Louderback, who was also up late, what gives. "His agent hasn't complained to me," Louderback said. "Sounds like posturing." Posturing? You mean, the kind of crick one gets from perpetually playing second fiddle?

Here's the clip of Rose and Albrecht's appearance — watch closely, because if there's anything to this rumor, it might not be repeated:

Scoble — chubby, bespectacled, and awkward, the unlikeliest of all video personalities — main job for the magazine was to produce a seemingly infinite series of video profiles of startups. Scoble's unwatchable videos mostly consisted of him lapping up tech blather from CEOs of doomed startup ventures about how they would be reinventing some paradigm or another. But as bad as they were, he fell from old-media grace for two main reasons.

First, he picked the wrong backers. The Fast Company Web guy who hired him, Ed Sussman, was loathed by his counterparts at the print magazine and got fired last year. And the videos were sponsored by Seagate, the hard-drive maker. After the company fired CEO Bill Watkins, with whom Scoble had a mutual lovefest, it was only a matter of time before the gravy train ended.

Second, there was Scoble's dangerous overuse of the Web startups he covered. FriendFeed and Twitter provided a steady IV drip of attention, so vital for soothing the damaged ego of a geek who never got over his awkward youth. But Scoble's paid work suffered while he volunteered to provide obsessive entertainment for his fellow Internet addicts.

He and Fast Company are saving face by continuing his column (heavily rewritten or wholly composed, no doubt, by an editor there). And he is, naturally, promising that he's meeting with a lot of companies to plan some exciting new startup. This is what one says in Silicon Valley when one is facing unemployment — the equivalent of talking up one's burgeoning freelance career in New York, or waxing enthusiastic about a script in Hollywood.

What really happened here: Scoble got invited by the pretty girl to the old-media prom. And he just got dumped. How will his ego ever recover?

In 2007, Facebook was the hot startup where everyone wanted to work, able to steal engineers away from the then-golden Google. Now, in 2009, it's become a company of close to 1,000 employees where more and more, people are eyeing the exits, wondering how they can escape the tyrannical whims of 24-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his tormented lieutenants. Netanel "Net" Jacobsson is just the latest to make his way out the door.

And he won't be the last: We hear that Charlie Cheever, a Facebook developer who's in Zuckerberg's inner circle, is also planning to leave soon.

Jacobsson was a director of business development at Facebook. Was, as confirmed by his bio on Twitter ("Fmr. Facebook director") and a message on the microblogging service.
Facebook PR is said to be eager to hush up Jacobsson's departure, following a series of exits over the last half-year of vital behind-the-scenes players: the loss of Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz; the contentious firing of platform director Ben Ling; and the deeply hushed-up departure of top designer Katie Geminder, who, it's rumored, was ill-treated by Zuckerberg himself. Moskovitz has a startup, Ling has returned to Google, and Geminder, now works for another Facebook refugee, former COO Owen Van Natta, at his Project Playlist startup.

We hear that Jacobsson's nemesis was his boss, VP Dan Rose, who's already famous for his ill treatment of another underling, Tim Kendall. Our tipster reports:

Lots of wrangling with Dan Rose. The story is very ugly. Dan said lots of inappropriate things to Net and has treated him very poorly, much worse than what he said to Kendall.

Net sent mail to folks today letting people know that he's leaving. Facebook is trying to keep it hush hush given the long series of departures. Wouldn't be surprised if Facebook tries to spin it.

Can't believe the number of enemies Facebook is making!

The problem for Facebook: Like a freshly signed-up user, Facebook is in desperate need of friends. It is constantly redesigning its service in an effort to find some lucrative new way of placing ads in its users' streams of pokes, photos, and Wall posts. And to make friends with businesses, it needs plugged-in glad-handers like Jacobsson.

And it's not like Zuckerberg is doing much to lighten the mood. We hear he threatened to fire his current COO, Sheryl Sandberg, in an argument about the controversial recent revision of Facebook's terms of service. He has a habit of running through confidantes quickly, which may explain Cheever's plans to leave.

It's the ultimate irony of Facebook: The company that aspires to connect the entire world can't keep a handful of key executives linked together.

Kapur has good timing — or at least a sense of realism. Despite a series of moves spearheaded by Kapur to copy Facebook feature for feature, the News Corp.-owned site has steadily lost traffic to the rival social network.

From: Chris Dewolfe
Sent: Tuesday, March 03, 2009 3:46 PM
To: FIM MySpace All
Subject: IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM CHRIS DEWOLFE

Hi everyone,

I want to notify you of some changes occurring to the senior executive team at MySpace.

Amit Kapur, our Chief Operating Officer, will be leaving the company to start a new venture. Many of us who have been lucky enough to work with Amit can attest to his tenacity, passion, and creativity as a leader within MySpace and the larger industry.

Jim Benedetto, SVP of Engineering and Steve Pearman, SVP of Product Strategy will join Amit in this new chapter. Personally, I'm incredibly excited to see what this team creates together and wish them the best of luck as they transition from helping run a company to building a new one. Most importantly, Amit, Jim, and Steve depart as great friends of MySpace and of our senior executive team. They will remain on board for the next few weeks to ensure a smooth transition company-wide.

We recently celebrated the five year anniversary of the launch of MySpace-it's a major milestone and everyone should be extremely proud of the global business that we have created in such a short amount of time. At its inception, MySpace was a product of the new social Web and in the last few years we've developed the most robust and diverse business in the marketplace.

MySpace is a social portal that empowers its global community to interact with people, content, and culture by giving individuals a personal, portable, and secure social experience. Originally, Yahoo gave consumers an organized way of navigating the Internet. Then, Google made searching the Internet extremely easy. Now, MySpace is making it simple for users to organize what's important to them through a personal and social lens.

Despite what the market tells us, 2009 will be a big year for our business. This year we will mature our existing market leading advertising technologies such as MyAds and HyperTargeting, as well as continue to innovate new ways for companies big and small to best leverage the MySpace platform. We are effectively monetizing the stickiest sections of our site such as Music and Video by coupling the world's richest content offering with creative ad programming online and off. What will always differentiate MySpace from others in the industry is our commitment to balancing revenue and relevancy.

On the product side, this past year was full of innovation including a site-wide global redesign, the impressive growth of our mobile initiatives, and the beginnings of our Open Platform product suite including MySpaceID. We're at the tip of the iceberg with the Open Platform and in the coming year we expect major new launches including payments and virtual goods. Also in 2009, MySpace Music will deliver the next round of product development such its international rollout, and new functionality including charts, ticketing, and merchandise. Most important, we will remain committed to executing on our product vision in a manner that engages our users in the process and considers their feedback every step of the way.

Tom and I want to reiterate how passionate we are about MySpace-we love the people, the product, and we believe in the future of the company. MySpace has a dedicated team of senior executives and I'd like to take the opportunity to spotlight some of these individuals. I encourage everyone to get to know our executive team as they are an enormously capable group of professionals from successful media and Internet powerhouses such as eBay, Yahoo!, MTV, and Symantec that will lead our company into its next phase.

MySpace Executive Team:
· Tom Anderson-President and Co-Founder
· Aber Whitcomb-Chief Technology Officer
· Travis Katz-GM and SVP of MySpace International
· Courtney Holt-President of MySpace Music
· Jeff Berman-President of Sales and Marketing
· Lin Cherry-General Counsel
· Tom Andrus-SVP of Product
· Manu Thapar-SVP of Engineering Operations
· Allen Hurff-SVP of Engineering
· Tish Whitcraft-SVP of Customer Care
· Jason Oberfest-SVP of Business Development
· Angela Courtin-SVP of Marketing
· Abe Thomas-VP of Online Marketing
· Dani Dudeck-VP of Global Corporate Communications

In a tough economy, we're continuing to prove to the industry that we're a serious business defining a new social portal category for a Web that's more personal, portable, and collaborative than ever before. Thanks everyone for a record breaking year 2008-the coming year will be even more important for the company and our 130 million global users worldwide.

Best,
Chris

Mayer, who runs Google's core search business, is the best known Google executive outside the search engine's CEO, Eric Schmidt, and its billionaire founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. And she's proven far more willing to pose for magazine covers and appear on morning news shows, making her the company's public face.

But she seems surprised that with such publicity comes criticism. According to Mayer, the reason why she draws negative press is because of sexism and stereotypes:

I think it's very comforting for people to put me in a box. ‘Oh, she's a fluffy girlie girl who likes clothes and cupcakes. Oh, but wait, she is spending her weekends doing hardware electronics.'

It's true that San Francisco, the last mainstream publication to profile her, focused on her most girly habits. But that has nothing to do with why so many rank-and-file Googlers outside the company's cloistered management despise Mayer.

To grasp that, it helps to understand Google's grandiose self-image: The company's spoiled engineers are led to believe they work in the most perfect meritocracy of ideas that the world has ever seen, motivated by the betterment of mankind through technology. At Google, the theory goes, who you are and who you know doesn't matter. It's only your ideas that count.

And yet, as the Times profile reveals, the real source of her power is the ability to manipulate Schmidt, Page, and Brin:

Given her longstanding relationship with Google's founders and Mr. Schmidt, she has become something of a sounding board for other managers, a number of whom routinely gravitate to her office.

At the end of a recent day, she met with two senior executives, Joe Kraus and Sundar Pichai, to discuss the company's social networking projects. Many executives at Google believe that social networking is important to its future. Ms. Mayer was meeting with Mr. Kraus and Mr. Pichai to help them prepare for a meeting the next day with Mr. Schmidt, Mr. Brin and Mr. Page to discuss how the company could leverage information-sharing among Google's many services.

"It's important you pregame Eric or it will be a disaster," Mr. Pichai tells Ms. Mayer about the pending meeting, asking her to seek Mr. Schmidt's support on their behalf.

"I know, I know," she responds. "I will call him or write an e-mail. I want them to see how complicated this will be."

Ms. Mayer e-mails Mr. Schmidt that evening. At the meeting the next day, Mr. Pichai's and Mr. Kraus's ideas are approved

The Times article does not mention a key reason why Mayer has such influence: Early in the company's history, she dated Page. (He is now married, and Mayer is engaged to Zack Bogue, a real-estate investment manager and lawyer.)

In dictating the appearance of Google's Web pages, Mayer freely admits she makes subjective decisions. In more than a decade on the job, she has not yet codified her design instinct into a written style guide. Instead, Mayer's whims, which managers under her must make a study of, are what rule.

Mayer may be talented. But her personal ties to Google's top management and her exerscise of arbitrary power are a betrayal of Google's supposedly meritocratic values — a betrayal obviously tolerated at the very top of the company. That, and not her spending time putting cupcake recipes in spreadsheets, is what exasperates her fellow Googlers.

That, and her perfectionist streak. Look at how Mayer dismisses a potential hire over a single bad grade:

One candidate got a C in macroeconomics. "That's troubling to me," Ms. Mayer says. "Good students are good at all things."

Another candidate looked promising with a quarterly rating from a supervisor of 3.5, out of 4, which meant she had exceeded her manager's expectations. Ms. Mayer is suspicious, however, because her rating hasn't changed in several quarters.

"She is looking for a way out," Ms. Mayer says.

Mayer complains that the media has not examined her life deeply:

Besides, Ms. Mayer says, there are some things that she hasn't previously revealed about herself and that the media have overlooked. Like her self-described athletic prowess.

"It hasn't shown up anywhere that I am really physically active," she says. "I ran the San Francisco half marathon this year. I did the Portland marathon. I went skiing just yesterday. I'm going to do the Birkebeiner, which is North America's longest cross-country ski race. That just shows you how much there are gaps."

Ah yes, the Portland Marathon, in which Mayer placed 7,074th out of 7,862 contestants. Or the Birkebeiner ski race, in which she placed dead last in the women's competition. Good students are good at all things.

Did she really mean to invite media scrutiny of her athletic career? What's really telling about it: In the handful of times where Mayer has competed on her own, without the backing of a billionaire ex-boyfriend and a pliant boss, she has proven to be an outright failure.

At the beginning of the piece, Mayer once again denies rumors of her impending departure from Google — rumors which Valleywag first reported. Perhaps she has realized that without Google, she's nothing. Can you blame her for clinging to her job?

(Photo via RacePhotos.net)