The Social

PALO ALTO, Calif.--"The stream of information coming at you can be overwhelming," Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said when asked in an onstage interview what she thinks of social-networking fatigue. "I think people sometimes feel uncomfortable hitting 'ignore' (on friend requests), but if you don't want to connect to someone, that's why it's there."

Facebook, after all, is on top of the world. It doesn't make much difference to the health of that 300 million-member user base if your "social graph" is one degree smaller.

Sandberg, who joined Facebook a year and a half ago after a high-ranking sales job at Google, was interviewed Thursday at the Palo Alto Research Center auditorium by industry analyst Charlene Li. The event had been organized by Silicon Valley networking group The Churchill Club.

Since then, she has become the company's foremost evangelist for some of its most prominent marketing pitches: the power of connectivity, and how Facebook can give businesses a more authentic face. Sandberg had given the talk in New York to debut "BrandLift," the social network's partnership with statistics firm Nielsen to provide audience response to advertisements.

Li's questions for Sandberg weren't particular hard balls. Rather, the interview followed Sandberg's usual talking points for a corporate audience: how Facebook is an unparalleled and unprecedented hub for communication and interaction, and how in turn it has changed marketing and communication--and that there's no other place on the Web for advertisers to get that kind of interaction with consumers.

"There are other places on the Web where you can get reach and audience. Certainly Yahoo offers that...What we have is deep engagement," Sandberg said. "We are by far the place where people spend the most time on the Web. On average, a monthly user on Facebook spends 5.75 hours on the site. No. 2 is Yahoo, and they are at 3 hours and 23 minutes. That is a really big gap."

(Ouch, Yahoo.)

Facebook might be "a marketer's heaven," as Li put it, but Sandberg said it also takes user privacy seriously--another regular and understandable Facebook talking point, considering it's had the occasional privacy snafu in which user backlash has reached a fever pitch.

"Why is our usage exploding, as some of the other social properties are decreasing?" Sandberg asked rhetorically, not explicitly mentioning MySpace, which recent numbers showed has seen much of its traffic eaten up by Facebook's. "We think it's because we made it really safe." She talked about how one of the first things she learned from CEO Mark Zuckerberg was the high number of members who put their cell phone numbers on their profiles. "Facebook is that safe," Sandberg said. "And so we take user privacy as the most important thing we do."

It obviously hopes to continue to get bigger. The company is working on "a deep integration with mobile carriers" to reach audiences that may have access to mobile devices but not PCs, and recently launched its Facebook Lite site "if you are in a country with slow bandwidth and slow loading times...we really wanted to speed it up."

Are advertisers warming up as Facebook's membership skyrockets? "They certainly get it more than they did a year ago," Sandberg said--and indeed, Madison Avenue didn't warm up to Facebook immediately, amid reports that social-network advertising was difficult to harness and even more difficult to profit from. "We're growing our users, and that's helping us a lot, and our ad products have improved tremendously...in a tough economy, advertisers and marketers are looking for value."

At least according to the Valley tech press, the biggest threat to Facebook's dominance these days isn't coming from Microsoft or Google, but from upstart Twitter--which Facebook famously tried to purchase and was snubbed.

She reiterated that while both Facebook and Twitter are "part of the same movement...real-time information shared quickly," that there's room in the field for more than one player and that competition is positive.

She said, though, that she hasn't jumped on the Twitter bandwagon because of what she considers an important differentiation between the two services.

"I don't use it very frequently. I've put, like, two or three tweets up ever," Sandberg said. "I'm not trying to broadcast to the world, I'm trying to share with my friends. It's not what I want to do. Twitter's much more of a broadcast-to-everyone kind of thing."

Hot on the heels of its appointment of a chief technology officer last week, News Corp.'s MySpace on Monday announced that Mark Rosenbaum has been hired as its chief financial officer.

Although the appointment marks the first time that the social network has had a CFO, it is Rosenbaum's second stint at News Corp. He headed up financial operations at Gemstar-TV Guide International, when it was owned by the Rupert Murdoch-helmed conglomerate. More recently, Rosenbaum served as a consultant to MGM.

Mark Rosenbaum's MySpace profile picture.

(Credit: MySpace)

In his new position, Rosenbaum report directly to Owen Van Natta, the former Facebook executive who became MySpace's CEO in April, after the departure of co-founder Chris DeWolfe.

Less than two months after Van Natta's hiring, MySpace announced a layoff of nearly 30 percent amid stagnant growth and what was increasingly a losing battle against Facebook in its quest for social-networking dominance. The company called its aim at financial efficiency a "return to start-up culture."

Hiring a chief financial officer is, as a result, a logical step.

"Having led companies at every stage of their development, Mark understands both start-up culture and mature businesses, and is well-suited to guide MySpace's financial organization through its next phase of growth," Van Natta said in a release announcing Rosenbaum's hire. "We're thrilled to add someone with his pedigree and experience to the team."

MySpace has appointed Alex Maghen to the role of chief technology officer, the News Corp.-owned social site announced Tuesday. He replaces outgoing CTO Aber Whitcomb, who had been at the company since its inception.

Maghen was already at MySpace, serving in the CTO position of its MySpace Music division, a joint venture with the major record labels. Prior to that, he held CTO roles at Yahoo Entertainment and MTV Networks--the latter of which was also the former employer of current MySpace entertainment execs Courtney Holt and Jason Hirschhorn.

"The next phase of MySpace's evolution will further empower our incredible audience of consumers, developers, artists, content creators, and advertisers with the tools they need to broadcast, discover, and express themselves," Maghen said in a release. "The future of our technology organization will be guided by an open platform and world-class standards to create a place of invention for our technical staff as well as the world's development community."

MySpace has fallen out of the tech industry's favor, surpassed both in traffic and technological innovation by once-smaller rival Facebook--even though MySpace advocated developer-friendly open standards well before Facebook came out in full support of them.

There have been some promising signs of late on the technology front: a MySpace-Twitter status sync proved popular enough to make MySpace's URL shortener the second most popular on the microblogging service.

AOL has promoted Stephane Panier to the role of president at social network Bebo, which it acquired last year for $850 million.

Panier, who joined AOL in January after six years at Google, had previously been serving as chief operating officer of Bebo.

Joanna Shields, who was CEO of Bebo when it was acquired, left AOL in May. Before she left, Shields was head of "People Networks," a new AOL division devoted to social networks. Last week, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong announced that People Networks would be nixed in a restructuring.

Bebo has been placed in a new division called AOL Ventures, and Panier will report to Jon Brod, executive vice president of AOL Ventures.

The $850 million Bebo buy did not turn out to be AOL's greatest success story, to say the least. Time Warner CEO Jeffrey Bewkes admitted that the company "may have overpaid," and much of Bebo's senior management soon began departing.

This week there is just no shortage of dudes named Armstrong in the press. There's the one who rides bikes and likes to tweet about it, the one who walked on the moon 40 years ago, and then there's Tim Armstrong, who has officially been CEO of AOL for 100 days as of Monday.

So he celebrated with press coverage! Armstrong interviews were published Monday on by the Associated Press, AllThingsD, AdWeek, and Advertising Age, and AOL advertising chief Jeff Levick talked to PaidContent. We hope Armstrong also commemorated the 100-day mark with some cupcakes, because while press coverage about ambitious future plans is generally a good thing for a new and already scrutinized executive, it doesn't taste good with buttercream frosting.

So what did Armstrong say? Basically, a whole lot about reinvention. AOL is slated to be spun off from parent company Time Warner in November, and will "be focused on scaling content, advertising, e-mail, messaging and local, but making it easier and less complicated," according to AllThingsD.

That may mean ditching some products--there are over 100 advertising products in AOL's portfolio, for example. And AOL has removed some of the ads from its own sites, making them appear less cluttered (like MapQuest, which had its 17 ads narrowed down to seven, per AdAge). But according to PaidContent, AOL will be ramping up its display advertising business, attempting to take hold of a niche in the market that has been in decline as search ads rose to prominence.

AOL, meanwhile, is "happy" with its search deal with Google, which is set to expire next year, but Armstrong, who headed up sales at Google before his hire at AOL, didn't tell any of the various reporters who pestered him whether they'd renew it. But he did hint that Bebo, the $850 million social-networking buy that AOL made last year, is basically getting shelved.

"Bebo has an opportunity to prove its products and services," Armstrong said to AdAge. "I would argue that the integration of Bebo (with AOL) is less important than having Bebo focus on its core product and service and really try to improve in the social-networking space." The social network has been grouped into AOL Ventures, a side arm of the company for acquisitions and investments outside of AOL's main content and advertising businesses.

Facebook has named former Genentech executive David Ebersman to the office of chief financial officer. He replaces Gideon Yu, whose departure was announced at the end of March.

"We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech's CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook."

David Ebersman earned a bachelor's degree from Brown University in 1991, according a university Web page.

(Credit: Brown University)

Ebersman served as chief financial officer at the San Francisco-area biotechnology company Genentech from 2006 through April 2009 after moving up the ranks in the company for about a decade. The company was sold to Swiss pharmaceuticals giant Hoffmann-LaRoche in March, shortly before Ebersman stepped down.

He will officially start at Facebook in September.

Gideon Yu's departure from Facebook came amid rumors that he had failed to secure enough venture capital to keep the advertising-based company pushing forward toward profitability, something that Facebook repeatedly denied. The company said its search for a new CFO would focus primarily on "someone with public company experience." Ebersman wasn't at Genentech when it went public in 1980, but certainly did have experience running the financial operations of a public company--as well as its sale to a bigger corporation.

Two months after Yu departed Facebook, the social-networking company announced that it had received an additional infusion of venture capital, to the tune of $200 million, from Russian investment company Digital Sky Technologies.

This post was updated at 12:01 p.m. PDT.

Not a particularly surprising move: LinkedIn president Jeff Weiner has taken over as CEO of the company, according to an announcement Wednesday from the business networking site.

Weiner, a former executive vice president at Yahoo, joined the company in January after then-CEO Dan Nye stepped down in December and founder Reid Hoffman took over as interim CEO. Hoffman will remain executive chairman of the company.

"LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the Internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals," Hoffman said in a release. "Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together."

LinkedIn now has over 42 million members, the company said, and hopes to be profitable this year for the second year in a row; it makes money not only from ads, but from premium subscriptions and "corporate solutions."

The company was aiming for a billion-dollar valuation just around a year ago when it raised a $53 million Series D funding round. Hoffman has gone on the record saying that he hopes LinkedIn will eventually go public.

Two new members have been added to the fresh lineup of MySpace's executive ranks, following the appointment of CEO Owen Van Natta last week.

Jason Hirschhorn, most recently president of Sling Media Entertainment and before that MTV Networks' chief digital officer, joins MySpace as its chief product officer. He's the second prominent MTV veteran to take on a role at the News Corp.-owned MySpace in the past year, following MySpace Music president Courtney Holt.

Hirschhorn is firmly on the digital-media and entertainment side of things, something that will invariably come into play as MySpace (ideally) restructures itself as an entertainment destination rather than a networking tool. At Sling, he was charged with the development of the SlingPlayer online video aggregator.

The other new MySpace hire comes from a more traditional Silicon Valley background: Michael Jones, who sold his start-up Userplane to AOL in 2006, joins the company as chief operating officer. MySpace is already familiar with Jones' work: it uses Userplane's chat technology for its Web-based chat client, MySpaceIM.

Both will be based in Los Angeles and report directly to Van Natta.

It's official: News Corp. has named former Facebook executive Owen Van Natta as MySpace's CEO, following reports on Thursday that an announcement was imminent. Van Natta's appointment is "effective immediately," a release from MySpace said.

Van Natta succeeds Chris DeWolfe, who stepped down from the post earlier this week, reportedly at the request of newly appointed News Corp. digital czar Jonathan Miller. DeWolfe will remain on the company's board.

Owen Van Natta

(Credit: Facebook, via All Things Digital)

"I'm thrilled to have the privilege to pilot MySpace in what is sure to be an incredibly exciting and rewarding next chapter for the business," Van Natta said in a statement. "I feel honored to build upon the immeasurable achievements of the MySpace founders and look forward to working with Jon and the MySpace team to meet the challenges and make the most of the opportunities before us."

Van Natta served as chief operating officer of Facebook before he was shifted--some would say demoted--to the position of chief revenue officer and vice president of operations. He left in February 2008 and later took the CEO position at social music start-up Playlist.

John Sykes, a Playlist board member and one of the original MTV co-founders, will take over Van Natta's CEO role there. Van Natta will continue to be an adviser to the start-up--which is interesting, since it technically competes with the MySpace Music service.

"Owen combines a deep understanding of social networking, a keen business sense, and the operational experience to guide MySpace through its next phase of growth. I'm confident his leadership will be an invaluable asset," Miller said in a statement. "I plan to work closely with Owen to shape our long-term vision around this vibrant community that already attracts more than 130 million users worldwide."

Facebook, Van Natta's old employer, has eclipsed MySpace in worldwide traffic with now more than 200 million active users.

Van Natta's a proven dealmaker. During his tenure as chief revenue officer, Facebook chalked up that whopping $240 million investment from Microsoft. But here's where he might be lacking: entertainment industry cred. With a background at Amazon, Facebook, and several tech start-ups, Van Natta--who will be based in Los Angeles at MySpace's headquarters--probably isn't on the Hollywood circuit. MySpace needs those entertainment connections, some of which come naturally with its News Corp. ownership, because it has a much sunnier future as a pop-culture hub than a social-networking tool.

That said, it's a good first sign that under Van Natta's watch, Playlist started inking deals with major record labels in order to stave off its legal troubles.

This post was expanded at 10:35 a.m. PT.