zuckerberg

q&a On Tuesday, Facebook announced that it had hired six-year Google veteran Sheryl Sandberg as its chief operating officer, a big move as the hot social network attempts to convince the Valley that it's here to stay and slated to keep growing fast.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had a few minutes to chat on the phone about Sandberg's new role at the company.

The 23-year-old CEO insisted that Sandberg isn't a pure replacement for outgoing executive Owen Van Natta. From what it sounds like, her role will be significantly more extensive. Not surprisingly, she's … Read more

The crew at Facebook has done well to amass a huge war chest (Microsoft's $240 million investment), 66 million members, 200,000 developers, 16,000 applications, 500 employees and somewhere between $100 million and $200 million in revenue for last year.

With the appointment of Sheryl Sandberg as COO, the odds just increased for Facebook to survive its adolescence (more on Techmeme).

Sandberg is 15 years senior to Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. She has been through the gauntlet, working in the Clinton administration and then at Google for six years, starting when the company had less than … Read more

Facebook announced on Tuesday that it has hired a new chief operating officer to replace the outgoing Owen Van Natta. Starting on March 24, veteran Google employee Sheryl Sandberg will take on the executive role at the social network.

For six years, Sandberg was vice president of global sales and operations at Google, where she helped to grow the company's AdWords and AdSense products, as well as its Google.org nonprofit division.

As part of her new job, according to a statement from the social-networking company, she will "be responsible for helping Facebook scale its operations and expand … Read more

Kara Swisher has a deliciously speculative piece up Friday about who Mark Zuckerberg should appoint to replace Owen Van Natta as Facebook's No. 2.

Before weighing in, though, I must say that Zuckerberg just made his first business mistake--nothing that he won't recover from, but an error nonetheless. He should have pulled an Andreessen. Instead, he's trying to pull a Gates.

Marc Andreessen was the technological brains behind Netscape. His company thrived--until it was brought down by Microsoft's death ray--because the role of Netscape CEO was entrusted to an experienced business executive named Jim Barksdale.

You … Read more

This post was updated at 7:06 PM PT to reflect Facebook's comment.

Owen Van Natta, Facebook's chief revenue officer and vice president of operations, has announced his departure from the social network.

Van Natta told All Things D's Kara Swisher in an interview on Tuesday that he plans to seek a CEO position at another company--the identity of which he's not sure of yet. At Facebook, Van Natta had been chief operating officer until an executive reshuffling last summer placed him (some would say it was a demotion) into his present role. He had been … Read more

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital reported on Thursday night that Facebook held an all-hands meeting earlier in the day to talk company finances--and that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was remarkably candid.

The 23-year-old executive announced that projected revenue for 2008 had been elevated from $300 million to $350 million; that's a big jump up from its 2007 revenue of $150 million. For better or worse, the privately held company plans to spend $200 million this year on capital expenditures (as Swisher puts it, "a whole lot of servers"), and Facebook's employee headcount is expected to rise … Read more

I know that being a parent has got to be the uncoolest perspective in Silicon Valley. After all, it's much more cutting edge to be libertarian, 23 years old, working 24/7 and sleeping on a futon in your cube.

But no one stays that way forever (thank goodness), and I'd like to think that those of us who have moved down the road a few years have a lot to add to technology design. With Facebook's Beacon plans blowing up this week, you can really see what happens when new "features" are added by twentysomethings who are coding and rolling out products as fast as they can.

I'm proposing a new job title to add to Facebook's Executive Team: VP of Adult Supervision.

My suggestion is only half-joking. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg was called out for ageism earlier this year after he stressed the importance of "only [hiring] young people with technical expertise."

The problem is that Facebook's users aren't only people like their mind-blowingly young executives and programmers. A large proportion of their users are over 35. We don't appreciate having our privacy stomped on, and just because we want to participate in social networks, we don't necessarily want to live our lives in an exhibitionist fishbowl. Product design suffers when a grown-up perspective is not taken into account.… Read more

This post was updated at 1 PM PT with comment from Overstock.com.

Plagued by allegations of everything from deceptiveness to invasion of privacy, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has publicly backed down on the social-networking site's controversial Beacon advertisements and announced new modifications.

In a post on the company blog on Wednesday morning, the 23-year-old executive apologized for the mess surrounding Beacon, which shares information about users' activity on third-party partner sites and posts it to their friends' "News Feeds."

"We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more … Read more

Today on the Facebook Blog, Mark Zuckerberg apologizes for the mistakes Facebook made in rolling out Beacon, and announces that the company is "releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely."

This is a clear victory for consumer backlash and protests. MoveOn.org spokesman Adam Green responds to today's development:

"Sites like Facebook are revolutionizing how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. The big question is: Will corporate advertisers get to write the rules of the Internet or will these new social networks protect our basic … Read more