Facebook’s Zuckerberg loses key guru

All is not well at Facebook, the ailing social networking business. Last month The First Post reported that Dustin Moskovitz, one of the company's co-founders, had allegedly moved to another office because relations with his partner, 23-year-old CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured), had become strained. Now Adam D'Angelo, Facebook's chief technical officer and a friend of Zuckerberg's since high school, has announced he is leaving the company altogether.

Is D'Angelo's departure down to his old friend's management style, which former colleagues have described as "control-freakish"? A source close to D’Angelo said "he felt his responsibilities no longer fit well with his skills and interests" while a Facebook spokesman said only that D'Angelo would be "transitioning out of his role" and "taking some time off".

Zuckerberg, who has been described as America's youngest self-made billionaire by Forbes magazine, has credited D'Angelo with teaching him much of what he knows about computers. D’Angelo, 23, was responsible for developing the website's technology infrastructure during a period of rapid user growth (the site was originally devised for American college students). He also developed the Facebook platform. It was this that caused the huge wave of interest in the company as entrepreneurs rushed to build applications that could take advantage of the connections between the site's millions of users.

His departure comes amid wide-scale restructuring at the company, which is struggling to maintain its position against similar businesses such as MySpace and Bebo. While Facebook has a valuation of $15bn – Zuckerberg himself is reputedly worth $5bn - it is reportedly haemorrhaging 40,000 users a month, a loss that is making investors uneasy.