Commenter Facebookcanhavehim shares this thought on Google überflack Elliot Schrage's prospective departure for Facebook:

In the newsrooms of Silicon Valley, they call it "going native." In New York, media is a semirespectable profession, and the skyscraper snobs of the world's leading infotainment conglomerates assume that those who drop out for lesser arts like PR just couldn't cut it. Not so here. Erika Brown, who covered venture capital for Forbes, is leaving the magazine to join Matrix Partners as the VC firm's director of marketing and business development. (Biz dev? I can't picture Brown, a snappy dresser, in blue shirts and pleated khakis.) Did Brown parlay her contacts from reporting into a new job? It's hard to imagine she didn't. And one can hardly blame her. The death of magazines may or may not be imminent. But serving time in a distant bureau of a magazine which is mostly diffident about the Valley is a career killer. Brown's note to friends:

3Com, seeing its future in China, has promoted EVP Robert Mao to CEO and relocated him there. (3Com tried to sell itself to a Chinese investor group last year, but the Department of Defense blocked the sale.) To run its U.S. business, the telecom-equipment maker also rehired Ron Sege as chief operating officer. In 1999, then a senior vice president, he left the company to join Lycos, and subsequently served as CEO of Tropos Networks, a wireless-broadband startup. Nine years to go from SVP to COO? I've heard good tech jobs are hard to find on the East Coast, but this is ridiculous.

A high-level hire by a rival is usually bad news. So why do I suspect insiders at Classmates.com are rejoicing at the news that former Yahoo executive Rachel Glaser is joining spammy social network Reunion.com as COO and CFO? The two sites have close to the same traffic, and similar unscrupulous methods for gaining paid subscribers, charging for access to questionably accurate alumni lists.

Engineer Mark Hamburg has left Adobe for Microsoft. Known as the "architect" of Adobe, Hamburg is credited by the Photoshop Hall of Fame with "programmer logic and the compositing models that unite Photoshop's imaging effects to specific features such as the history palette, free transform, screen caching, and shapes." Hamburg will move to Seattle and focus on "user experience." [LightroomNews]

Morgan Stanley managing director Benjamin Fried will replace Google's departed CIO Douglas Merrill, News.com reports. Besides making sure Googlers using Linux, Vista and Mac OS X can continue to work together, Fried will likely resume Merrill's role as evangelist for Google's enteprise software products. His background in Wall Street's risk-averse IT community should help Google's credibility with wary CTOs. On the ultimate frisbee field, however, Fried looks to be more a liability. He loves the sport, News.com reports, but he's got bad knees. In other words, put your money on Facebook continuing to drink Google's Jamba Juice.

Meet Maria Thomas, arts and crafts auction site Etsy's new COO. "Why the heck am I COO?" Thomas asks in a video (embedded below). Her answer: She ran Amazon.com's camera business, back when the site still had navigational tabs. The Brooklyn-based Etsy is already profitable. We're hoping it gets really big, goes public, and catches the eye of New York's insular media. Because we can't wait for the SNL parody of clips like this one:

Linden Lab, which operates the Second Life virtual world, has found a new CEO: Mark Kingdon, the longtime chief of Organic, an online ad agency. A bizarre move for Linden, and seemingly for Kingdon. Sophisticated marketers, having toyed with Second Life, agree that it's a nonstarter as an advertising medium. Linden Lab makes its money from serving as a virtual central bank and a taxing authority. IBM is interested in it largely as a substitute for teleconferencing. Philip Rosedale, the founder and outgoing CEO, is a dreamy technologist, but replacing him with an adman makes no sense. An enterprise-software salesman would have made more sense.

This upcoming film called "The Babysitters" is about babysitters, alright—hooker babysitters. One high school girl starts off as a mere child supervisor, but quickly comes to find that she can build more wealth selling her own body. Then all her high school friends are like "Hey, us too!" This movie may have been made before, but probably never outside the pornography industry. It stars Cynthia Nixon, and John Leguizamo as the lecherous husband, which is the role that John Leguizamo was born to play. The trailer [via Videogum], after the jump.

It has been almost eight months since Google CFO George Reyes turned in his resignation. (Under pressure and personal disdain, we hear; his fellow executives routinely called him an "idiot" behind his back.) Since then, at least two people have been offered the job and turned it down. Even if Google were to announce a new CFO tomorrow in its earnings call, the delay will have gone past embarrassing and into mystifying. Who wouldn't want to help run the world's fastest-growing big media company, which has minted an army of billionaires? We'd heard rumors that Reyes was digging into matters that CEO Eric Schmidt didn't want him involved in. Did Google's prospective CFOs, once they started going through the books, find something frightening enough to send them fleeing from a dream job?

Spot Runner, an L.A.-based startup, creates and places TV ads for businesses, especially those which don't usually advertise on TV. That, at least, is its pitch to big agencies, by which Spot Runner doesn't want to be viewed as competition. That explains its latest hire: Former Interpublic Media CEO Mark Rosenthal, who oversaw agencies Universal McCann, Initiative, and Magna Global, among others. [PaidContent]

Could Apple be preparing to spend its $18 billion cash hoard on acquisitions? Apple has hired Charles Charnas, an 18-year HP veteran who oversaw the $25 billion merger between Compaq and HP, to run Apple's intellectual-property licensing and strategic acquisitions. But don't count on Apple making any Yahoo-sized purchases. The company prefers to spend its cash in small amounts, buying talent and patents instead of large businesses which require integration. [9 to 5 Mac]

Google's best hope in the Yahoo takeover battle is to have nothing happen. A Yahoo, weak but independent, providing just enough competition to keep antitrust cops off Google's back, is the best outcome. To assure that, CEO Eric Schmidt has turned to the unlikeliest of layabouts: investment banker Frank Quattrone, who's trying to make a comeback after having an obstruction-of-justice conviction overturned. How frustrating for the hard-charging Quattrone: In this assignment, he'll only succeed by assuring that a deal doesn't come to fruition.

Former Yahoo VP Tim Cadogan will become CEO of OpenX, an open source ad-serving firm. The company will move its headquarters from London to Los Angeles to accommodate the new boss, reports BoomTown. At OpenX, Cadogan inherits funding from Index Ventures, Accel Partners, First Round Capital, Mangrove Capital and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. Cadogan left Yahoo on February 29 "to do something different with career." Most of our commenters marked the news as a blow to Yahoo. "Tim was a guy that even the engineers respected," wrote therealsunnyvalequeen. Another: "The good, the bad and the incompetent. It's all too clear who remains at Yahoo."

Neil Budde, the man who built the pay wall at the Wall Street Journal before moving to Yahoo to lead up their News, Sports and Finance sites, has landed at news aggregator startup DailyMe — guess that gig at the LA Times didn't pan out. Budde left the Journal during the dot-bomb, only to picked up by Terry Semel in the executive hiring spree that included Lloyd Braun. How does Fort Lauderdale-based DailyMe differentiate itself from aggregators like Budde's old Yahoo News or the Huffington Post? A special application that automatically prints your personalized news at home on a set schedule — which sounds an awful lot like those "news to your fax machine" services from yesteryear.

Health-conscious Googlers aren't sad to see new Facebook chef Josef Desimone go. "Josef Desimone was not Google's top chef," a Googler tells us. "Everyone hated his cafes. He had the worst heavy, everything-fried menus." Let's see who's slow and heavy on the ultimate field now.

Is it "poaching" when a company steals a rival's chef? At Google, executive chef Josef Desimone scrambled cruelty-free eggs by the truckload. Now Facebook has hired him to replace steam-heated trays of takeout with the kind of free food Googlers are used to. For engineers, Facebook is the new dreamland, and a company cafeteria is the kind of perk they've come to expect. But foodwise, Facebook's simply not as interesting a challenge as Google, with its thousands of employees and campuses dotted around the globe.

Douglas Merrill, CIO at Google and recent Fast Company coverboy, is leaving Mountain View to become president of record label EMI. At first I thought former PodTech CEO John Furrier was pulling a fast one, but John Paczkowski confirmed via email that it's no hoax. Look for the official press tomorrow, Furrier added, before complaining that TechCrunch didn't cite him for the scoop.

Scott Galloway of Firebrand Partners scored a coup recently: The New York Times Co. agreed to nominate him and a fellow activist investor for a seat on its board. Did the Times do any due diligence on him? Galloway's chief accomplishment online is cofounding RedEnvelope, a San Francisco-based online retailer.

Electronic Arts has hired Eric Brown, an EA veteran, back from McAfee as CFO to replace the abruptly departing Warren Jenson. This comes as the company is trying to buy rival Take-Two Interactive. [WSJ]