• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, December 1, 2009

Social news site Digg on Monday announced the appointment of Keval Desai, presently Google's director of product management, as its new vice president of product. Desai's last day at Google was Monday, according to TechCrunch, which broke the news that day.

Desai joined Google in 2003, and has since led development of product/businesses in Google's advertising business, including AdWords, syndication and TV ads.

Despite being eclipsed by newer social news sites like Twitter, Digg has attracted some top-tier talent over the past year. Most notably, Chas Edwards -- Federated Media Publishing's co-founder, publisher and chief revenue officer -- left to join Digg as its publisher and chief revenue officer in late May.

"It's still the early days for figuring out the models that bring brands into conversation with the Digg community," Edwards said in late May. "Advertising doesn't perform for the advertisers if it doesn't also resonate with the audience ... It succeeds only when it enhances the product and the conversation among those audience members."

In January, meanwhile, Digg hired former Yahoo sales executive Thomas Shin to lead its sales efforts. Just weeks earlier, the Silicon Valley-based company pared its workforce by 10% and outlined other steps it would take to become profitable in 2009, including hiring a direct sales force and rolling out new features to expand its user base.

At the same time, at the beginning of the year, Hitwise reported that the market share of traffic to Twitter had surpassed Digg's for the first time.

This year, the company will likely have revenues of "around" $15 million, according to TechCrunch.

As the industry in which it exists continues to evolve, Google has recently experienced its fair share of defections and executive turnover.

In September, Michael Rubenstein, who joined Google when it acquired DoubleClick in 2008, left the company "to pursue another opportunity." At DoubleClick and then Google, Rubenstein was in charge of building an ad exchange -- which has yet to officially launch as initial excitement over such a product fades.

Rubenstein's departure follows former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt's exit from the company at the end of April. Rosenblatt, president of Google's global display advertising business, was the third major executive to leave the company in the last two months --after Tim Armstrong, former head of Americas sales, left to become AOL's CEO and Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, former president of Google's Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations, left to join a venture capital firm.