• Financial Times, Wednesday, July 25, 2007 11 AM

High-powered Web media executives have a tendency to jump around like mosquitoes, moving from one Next Best Thing to another. For Google's YouTube, CFO Gideon Yu's decision to crossover to Facebook, may be a sign of the times. Facebook is where the Web's best minds want to be, not YouTube or News Corp.'s MySpace--yesterday's Web 2.0 darlings. Yu will take the place of Mike Sheridan, the company's current CFO, who did not disclose his reasons for leaving.

Yu's appointment underscores social network's emergence as a major player in the Web industry. In many ways, Facebook has expanded the scope of social networking by encouraging software developers to use it as a platform for the Internet's hottest trend: consumers' use of mini Web applications known as "widgets."

Effectively, widgets act like mini Web browsers, allowing consumers to post dynamic or interactive content to their Web pages. Experts say Facebook is turning the Web into a software operating system for distributing programs to consumers. According to investor Peter Thiel, the company is now worth between $7 billion and $10 billion and could be exploring a possible sale or an IPO. Last year, Yahoo sought to buy the company for $1 billion.

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