The FriendFeedization Of Facebook Continues: Bret Taylor Promoted To CTO

Facebook has a new chief technology officer, Bret Taylor. The FriendFeed co-founder and initial product manager of Google Maps came to Facebook with the $50 million acquisition of FreindFeed last year. He took on the role of director of platform at Facebook, and led the recent rollout of Facebook's Open Graph and Open Graph API, which attempts to make social connections on the Web as important as hyperlinks . He played a key role in making the Facebook platform much simpler to build on. Increasingly, Facebook is looking more and more like FriendFeed, with like buttons sprouting everywhere and a stronger emphasis on the central stream. Taylor brought a lot of the engineering and design sensibilities from FreindFeed and started to instill them in Facebook. Now he is being promoted to the vacant CTO role, where he will oversee other projects beyond the Facebook platform. Below is the email Mark Zuckerberg sent out to all Facebook employees moments ago announcing Taylor's promotion, which Facebook provided to TechCrunch: