That could change soon, as Facebook throws its massive social gaming weight behind HTML5. Because now Facebook, in addition to declaring its public support for HTML5 as a way to unite development across desktop and fragmented mobile platforms, is evangelizing that social game makers use HTML5 instead of Flash.

Cory Ondrejka, the former CTO of Linden Labs who joined Facebook when it bought his start-up Walletin late last year, wrote a blog post and gave a tech talk on the topic at Facebook HQ last night (hat tip to GigaOM). Ondrejka wrote:

With wide adoption and industry support, HTML5 will transform desktop and mobile gaming, creating amazing user experiences that are only a link away. Already, over 125 million people visit Facebook using HTML5 capable browsers just from their mobile phone, and that number skyrockets when we add in desktop browsers. The future is clear.

HTML5 games will (ideally) behave the same way across desktop, mobile and console platforms. Today, developers have to choose. (Adobe does offer Flash support on mobile, but some phones, notably the iPhone, don’t support it.)

For instance, most Zynga games are still exclusively released in Flash on Facebook. The company says it’s a matter of prioritizing development resources.

Meanwhile, it takes quite awhile for a game like Angry Birds, which is successful on one platform (in this case, iPhone), to launch on Android and other mobile OSs. And that annoys users because they can’t play their favorite games everywhere, or at all.

But HTML5 is not totally ready for the task. HTML5 browsers have varied abilities and levels of performance, and existing HTML5 games “often exhibit quirks and low frame rates,” so Ondrejka and his Walletin co-founder Bruce Rogers built a benchmarking tool that “exercises browsers under game-like conditions to measure how many sprites can move around on the screen at once.”

That sounds suspiciously like Facebook is building its own gaming product–if only for testing purposes–so Ondrejka was sure to state in his post, “Is Facebook Making Games? Definitely not.”

Ondrejka concluded that browsers are indeed inconsistent when it comes to rendering game elements in HTML5. “We want to help,” he said, since developers who master HTML5 will have much more versatile skill sets, rather than just excelling at one platform.

Plus, enabling multiplatform games works to Facebook’s business advantage, as app makers who use HTML5 will be less likely to ditch Facebook for the often more lucrative iPhone, or the increasingly widely deployed Android.

And that means more games on more devices for everybody.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Sean Ryan (pictured here), who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources.

Currently, Facebook does not create social games, but hosts third-party publishers of them on its king-making platform. Its most stunning success has been Zynga, maker of Farmville and CityVille.

The move seems sudden, since he just got his latest position. But sources said Ryan and execs at the Silicon Valley social networking giant had been talking about a job there before he went to News Corp.

Thus, at this point at least, Ryan’s main job will be a high-profile developer relations dude–in essence, keeping Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in line and also, presumably, happy.

Translation: Adventures in babysitting former Facebook COO and now Zynga COO Owen Van Natta!

Ryan, whose title will be director of gaming partnerships, will report to Ethan Beard, director of the Facebook Developer Network.

Facebook is clearly building out its gaming talent bench.

Ryan will work closely with Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers–who joined Facebook after the acquisition of their social gaming start-up Walletin in November to head platform games engineering efforts.

Sources said that News Corp.’s efforts will now be taken over by John Welch, who came to the media giant after Ryan acquired his casual games company Making Fun.

At the time, Ryan said he was working on a platform designed to support games on Facebook, Apple’s iPhone Google’s Android mobile operating system and News Corp.-owned Myspace.

Ryan got to News Corp. a little after it acquired Irata Labs, a social gaming developer. He had the title of EVP and GM of Games at News Corp. Digital.

Ryan is well known in the gaming and monetization space. He was acting CEO of Live Journal and also CEO of Meez, a virtual world and also Listen.com.

(Full disclosure: News Corp. also owns Dow Jones, which owns this site.)

BoomTown is awaiting comment from Facebook and News Corp.

But Ryan and George Kliavkoff throw their 17th Annual “After-After” Party at the Consumers Electronics Show in Las Vegas at 11:59 PM Thursday, so come by and say congrats!

Bret Taylor

But there’s also a pattern emerging for what happens to that talent once folks arrive at Facebook. Acqhired CEOs hold prominent roles on Facebook’s product team; nearly every recent Facebook product launch seems to have been led by an acqhired employee. Most recently, Facebook Messages was product-managed by Dan Hsiao, who joined the company with the FriendFeed acquisition. Hsiao had actually been a more junior member of the FriendFeed team, having started there as an intern in 2008. Now he is managing what Facebook called the largest engineering team it has ever put together for a launch.

Meanwhile, former FriendFeed CEO Bret Taylor is CTO of Facebook. Hot Potato CEO Justin Shaffer was product manager for Facebook Groups and is now product manager for the company’s Places and Events products (his company was only acquired in August). Divvyshot CEO Sam Odio is now product manager for Facebook Photos. Nextstop CEO Carl Sjogreen now holds the title “head of platform development,” according to a Facebook spokeperson.

And Gokul Rajaram, known for his seminal work as a product manager on Google AdSense, is now in charge of Facebook’s ad technology. Rajaram came to Facebook through the acquisition of his company Chai Labs, also last August. Multiple sources confirmed Rajaram’s role at Facebook, though Facebook declined to.

Gokul Rajaram

Facebook has its reasons for keeping a big-name hire like Rajaram under the radar; for one, Google can’t be happy to have lost the opportunity to buy his start-up. The former Googler has been an adviser and director to multiple companies, including Canoe Ventures and Associated Content.

Elsewhere, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt from Facebook’s first acquisition, Parakey, have had significant roles on products like Facebook Questions and the Facebook iPhone app. Ross’s title is Director of Product, though he is currently on sabbatical. Hewitt is working on undisclosed projects but “more on the engineering side,” said the spokesperson.

Facebook is not yet talking about where it will assign Sam Lessin, CEO of the just-acquired storage start-up Drop.io, and Cory Ondrejka and Bruce Rogers, founders of the just-acquired gaming start-up Walletin.

Facebook says it has about “two dozen PMs,” so the acqhired folks account for a significant but not dominant portion of that corps.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told me last month:

We have a big footprint but we want to operate like a startup and take risks, and the best way to do that is to get people who self-select towards being entrepreneurs… The only real theme is that we haven’t bought any companies yet to get the company. It’s always been because we have a lot of respect for the people involved.

This kind of track record may make Facebook an even more enticing acquirer for small start-ups. On the other hand, it’s probably disheartening for Facebook’s homegrown talent to see these opportunities handed to people who are brand-new and who, in many cases, have little experience working at the scale of hundreds of millions of users.

*Facebook has also explored larger acquisitions of companies like Twitter and Foursquare (though Kara Swisher reported those talks were less serious than portrayed elsewhere), but those deals were never consummated.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Bret Taylor photo (CC) Brian Solis.

Merrill’s hire in April 2008 was supposed to represent EMI’s willingness to break free from its old CD-based businesses, and a breath of fresh air. Merrill, who had formerly been Google’s (GOOG) CIO, cheerfully admitted that he had no background in the music business.

But it’s not clear what, if anything, Merrill was able to accomplish since he moved to EMI. On the other hand, it’d be hard to imagine any single executive being able to make much impact at EMI or any other label, given the industry’s accelerating decline.

Meanwhile, Guy Hands, the private equity executive whose Terra Firma shop bought EMI in 2007, has had to write off half the value of his investment, and that’s probably an optimistic valuation. And earlier this month Hands himself stepped down from his position as Terra Firma’s CEO.

Here’s the internal announcement from EMI CEO Elio Leoni-Sceti:

From: Internal Communication
Sent: Mon Mar 23 19:31:21 2009
Subject: ORGANISATION ANNOUNCEMENT – from Elio Leoni-Sceti

Dear all

With digital now comprising over 20 per cent of our revenues and growing fast, and with the progress we have made in integrating all of our digital operations fully into the business, we will no longer operate a standalone digital function.

Douglas Merrill has today stepped down from his roles as President of Digital and COO of EMI New Music and will be leaving the company.

I would like to thank Douglas for his contribution and to wish him well for the future.

Digital Marketing

I am delighted to announce that Cory Ondrejka is appointed to the newly-created position of Executive Vice President, Digital Marketing, reporting initially to me and then to our new President of Marketing whose appointment we expect to announce shortly. We have been planning this promotion for Cory for some time now. In his new role he will help us deliver our goal of leveraging the power of digital across our business, particularly in the key areas of consumer understanding and analytics, content creation and digital marketing, in order to strengthen the relationship and interaction between our artists and their fans.

Cory is a highly talented executive with a passion for music and a complementary, technology-based skillset. Since he joined us from Second Life last year he has helped us create a new approach to digital that will be unique to the music industry including establishing a world-class engineering team on the West coast and instituting modern, agile software development practices and tools that are the foundations to help us transform our approach to analytics and marketing.

He will be making further announcements about his Digital Marketing team in due course.

New Music

Nick Gatfield and Billy Mann, our Presidents of A&R Labels for North America/the UK and International respectively, will join the EMI Music Executive Committee and, as members of the New Music Operating Board, will continue to support me directly in my role as President of EMI New Music.

Under their leadership, EMI is building very strong creative momentum. In the last four weeks alone their A&R Labels teams around the world have signed 14 new artists, three in the US, four in the UK and seven in the rest of the world.

Digital Supply Chain/IT

Peter Baker, VP, Digital Software Engineering, and Dan Levine, VP, Digital Product Development, who have been leading the work on our Digital Supply Chain, now report to Ronn Werre, President, EMI Music Services. Ronn will be making the Digital Supply Chain a top priority so that we can best serve our artists and our customers.

Richard Piercy, Acting Chief Information Officer, now reports to Chris Kennedy, our Chief Financial Officer. Richard will continue to oversee our global IT system which is an important strategic enabler and one that is strongly linked to our management and financial reporting requirements. Chris will ensure that IT supports the company’s strategic ambitions effectively and efficiently.

Meanwhile Mark Piibe, in his role as SVP of Digital Business Development, will report to Ronn Werre whose Music Services team now leads all deals and relationships with our digital and physical retail partners.

Building our new music repertoire and embedding digital into everything we do are key to our future success. With our growing creative momentum under strong A&R leadership and the final integration of all remaining digital functions into the business, we have a solid platform for enhanced performance in this coming year.

Thank you for your continued efforts.

All the best
Elio