According to Techcrunch who received an email from Facebook’s PR team, Bret Taylor has become the CTO of Facebook.

Bret Taylor is know for working on Google Maps not Gmail at Google then striking out on his own to launch Friendfeed with Gmail creator Paul Buchheit. Friendfeed a great engineered product that was loved my many of the early adopter geeks was way ahead of its time. Facebook acquired Friendfeed almost a year ago. Since then Bret and Mark Zuckerberg have been teaming up in public on many occasions to push the evolution of the Facebook platform.

Face of Facebook – The Dynamic Duo – Mark and Bret
Bret and Mark are the dynamic duo of Facebook. Mark is super geek and young and Bret is a bit older has a family and is loved by the community. The two are a PR guys dream. Facebook is continuing to esemble a great team over there with the continous poaching of top Google and exGoogle talent. Bret was one of many in a string of hires. Sheryl continues to make it happend over there with Mark Z. Now adding Bret to the senior equation really packs some young geek star power.

CTO Has No Direct Reports – VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer Still In Charge
This past October I sat down for an exclusive interview with Facebook’s Vice President of Engineering Michael Schroepfer to talk about Facebook and his engineering organization. There will be no change to the engineering organization according to Zuckerberg. Bret will report directly to Mark Zuckerberg and have no direct reports and will be a complement to Michael Schroepfer who is the key executive in charge of the growth as the VP of Engineering.

My Angle: This is a strategic and external showman position. Meaning that Bret is now Mark’s adviser and staff for the PR department for Facebook. Of course I can see the roadshow to go public now- Mark Z, Sheryl S, Bret T, Mike S, Mike M, and Elliott S. That lineup will wow the bankers. As they say on Wall Street “it’s all in the optics”.

Bret will have no decision making authority at Facebook and will be a big influential within the orgainziation only. Normally when big moves like this happen it’s critical that it doesn’t upset the reporting structure and feelings of the worker bees in the company. Zuckerberg is clear that Schroepfer is in charge of engineering and will continue to manage the engineering business. For now Bret will be on the bench waiting for his next assignment. I’m sure with Facebook growing like a weed Bret will be tapped shortly to manage a new project.

In the meantime Bret could enjoy the rest and take a break fro the action. Here is Mark Zuckerberg’s email sent internally.

Here is the internal Facebook email announcing the decision.

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Internal Email from Mark Zuckerberg
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Hey everyone,

I have some good news to share with all of you. I’ve created a new role and have asked Bret Taylor to become our CTO.

Bret joined us almost a year ago as our director of platform products. Since then, he has played a key role in building many parts of our new platform, including social plugins, our new graph API and the Open Graph. Since f8, already more than 100,000 sites use social plugins and our new API has received lots of praise for its elegance and simplicity. In addition, Bret has helped shape my thinking on products, engineering and strategy in many ways.

Today, Bret has just a couple of direct reports and gets things done by being a helpful source of advice and positively influencing decisions on a number of products. I’ve been talking with him recently about how he could play a similar role working with a few other areas to help shape our direction as well. Since Bret engages both in technical and product issues, I decided that creating a new CTO position outside of both engineering and product was the best way to formalize this new role.

In this role, Bret will report to me and will not manage anyone else. The CTO role is not a management role. The roles of building and running the product, engineering and operations organizations aren’t changing at all here. If you would have gone to Schrep, Chris Cox or Heiliger for something in the past, you should still go to them now. (Although, to be honest, Schrep, Cox, Bret and I all sit in the same pod so you can pretty much grab any of us at the same time.)

Bret will stay focused on Platform, but this new role sets him up to help out more in other areas as well. The platform product management work Bret has been doing will continue to report to Cox and the product organization as he does this. One of the reasons we can make this change is because of the great work Mike Vernal has been doing to lead the engineering team. I’m highly confident in him to continue building out this organization.

When I look around product and engineering, there are so many unique things we’re building with very leveraged small teams right now. Platform is the foundation for an entire industry, and our team has about 30 engineers. News Feed is the home page for more than 250 million people every day, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. Our search type ahead serves the same order of magnitude of queries as Google, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. These are examples of transformative products that we’re going to build out over the next few years and I’m focused on making sure we build them out the right way.

If you have a moment, please join me in congratulating Bret on his new role. If you have questions about this or anything else, feel free to shoot me a note or come ask it at our next Open Q&A.

Mark

Can you say IPO roadshow?