Bret Taylor will be new Facebook CTO

From its launch in 2006, Facebook did not have a CTO in its ranks but now Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced on Wednesday that Bret Taylor who is currently company’s Director of Platform will be the new Chief Technology Officer of the company.

Bret Taylor is one of the ex-Google employee where he worked as Product Manager and was the co-creator of Google Maps and Google Maps API. After leaving Google, Taylor created a startup, FriendFeed and joined Facebook when Facebook acquired FriendFeed in 2009. When Taylor joined Facebook,  the company open-sourced the Tornado server created by Taylor which powered FriendFeed’s impressive real-time streaming capabilities.

Here is an excerpt of the email sent by Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg  to Facebook employees and a copy to TechCrunch:

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.)