San Francisco - Social networking site Facebook has poached the Google executive responsible for making the company the biggest ad company in the world in a sign of its ambition to emulate the success of its Silicon Valley neighbor. Sheryl Sandberg, 38, was among the first 300 employees at Google and served as the company's vice president for global online sales. At Facebook she will work as chief operation officer helping the red-hot site build its operation globally, managing sales, marketing and business development, Facebook said. She will report to Mark Zuckerberg, the company's 23-year-old chief executive officer.
In October the company was valued at 15 billion dollars when Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software maker, purchased a 1.6 per cent stake for 240 million dollars.
Facebook has 100.7 million visitors in January, up four-fold from a year earlier, according to researcher ComScore. The site is almost equal with MySpace, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which had 109.3 million users in January, an increase of 15 per cent, ComScore said.
