Facebook confirmed our report that it has reorganized its technical teams around key product areas, naming Bret Taylor, Chris Cox, Greg Badros, Mike Schroepfer and Sam Lessin as leaders of product groups reporting to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

So who are these newly elevated execs and what are the details of their new roles?

Sources said the company is still figuring out what to officially do about shuffling the five mens’ titles. Currently, its public-facing management page remains unchanged and a press release is nowhere to be found.

Facebook seems to be trying to get the most out of every last second it has as a private company, not revealing important bits of information. That includes which person is assigned to which product area, and even what those product areas are.

If Facebook PR wants to get all cryptic about it, that won’t stop AllThingsD.com! (We’re like the War Operations Plan Response (W.O.P.R.) computer in “WarGames” — soon we’ll have all the launch code numbers and let loose the missiles.)

Before that, the first and most important thing to remember is that CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg remains the king of product power at Facebook. It all rolls up to him, seated at the dead center around which all these new spokes turn.

Of the new arrangement, what’s also key to keep in mind, as one source aptly describes it, is that this is a ”verticalization” of Facebook, which had largely been horizontal before, with top execs covering a wider range of areas.

Now, it is more siloed and — presumably — more nimble, with more powerful lords of product areas in charge.

That’s a lot like the management rejiggering Google has done recently under its aggressive new CEO and co-founder Larry Page, although Facebook’s slicing and dicing seems to be more a matter of addressing internal growth and making the organization more functional.

Here’s the rundown that we have pieced together so far:

Privacy and Identity — a critical area for Facebook, since it seems to have an ongoing issue with it (or lack thereof) — will go to Lessin.

Communications and Apps — the real guts of the product — will get the leadership of Cox.

Infrastructure — the nuts and bolts of keeping the global megopolis of Facebook humming — will be the purview of Schroepfer.

Mobile and Platform — the big forward-looking areas — will be run by Taylor.

And Monetization — which includes advertising products and will pay for this whole shebang — will come under the sway of Badros.

But, until all is revealed by the social networking giant, here are some details of the newly named product potentates of Facebook — all men, it should be noted — you might want to know about:

Bret Taylor: As was previously reported here, Taylor is currently leading Facebook’s “Buffy” phone project, which is its HTML5-oriented smartphone effort.

Taylor was named Facebook CTO in June 2010 and has historically had no direct reports. His projects at Facebook have included platform, search, News Feed and mobile.

Taylor is a consistent presence at Facebook’s big public events. Even though he presents about technical stuff, his delivery is considered by many observers inside and outside the company as much smoother than his often awkward boss, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Prior to Facebook, Taylor co-founded FriendFeed, a geeky social app aggregator bought by Facebook; the app’s influence is seen in many of Facebook’s social products today. Prior to that, while at Google he helped create Google Maps.

Taylor has a young family and is a really big Stanford football fan.

Chris Cox: Chris Cox is Facebook’s well-liked product head and the company’s only real home-grown management star. He joined Facebook in 2005, shortly after graduating from Stanford, and has worked on products such as News Feed early on in their gestation. At one point as a young staffer, he was promoted to be in charge of Facebook’s human resources and helped set a tone for the company’s culture.

Cox often appears at Facebook events to talk about the human impact of Facebook’s products, and the merits of “social design.”

The charismatic exec got married this year and has played in a reggae band.

Greg Badros: Outsiders have been less familiar with Greg Badros. Badros had been in charge of advertising engineering at Facebook for the past two years.

Prior to joining Facebook in June 2009, Badros worked at Google for six years, where he was particularly instrumental on its well-known AdSense and Gmail products.

“Star” is the word multiple of Badros’s acquaintances and former colleagues used to describe him.

Badros is technical, entrepreneurial, articulate and humble, said former Keval Desai, his Google colleague and current VC at Interwest Partners.

“He can speak to a crowd of engineers and sales people with equal ease,” he said. “He was a star at Google and instrumental in scaling the AdSense platform.”

Badros has a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and did his undergrad at Duke.

Mike Schroepfer: Along with Cox and Taylor, Schroepfer has been at the top of Facebook’s org for a while as VP of engineering.

Schroepfer, who’s known internally and externally as Schrep, was previously VP of engineering at Mozilla and, before that, at Sun Microsystems.

He’s recently done a bunch of traveling with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to encourage women in tech and to open Facebook’s New York engineering office.

The affable exec also has a young family and just bought a Nissan Leaf.

Sam Lessin: The most recent addition of the group to Facebook, Lessin joined last October when Facebook nominally acquired his start-up Drop.io. Along with other “acqhired” CEOs, he has been influential within Facebook as a product manager.

Lessin was the major driver of Facebook’s upcoming Timeline redesign, which makes users’ profiles into visual journals of their lives. Timeline has not rolled out as soon as Facebook said it would, but it’s a major ongoing project that it seems natural for Lessin to continue to lead.

While still at Drop.io, he started a side project called letter.ly for paid personal email newsletters. Before that, he worked at Bain & Company.

Lessin went to Harvard at the same time as Zuckerberg and seems to be tightly integrated into the inner Facebook social circle. He recently became engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Wall Street Journal tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro.

(Full disclosure: Dow Jones owns both The Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD.com. Dow Jones is owned by News Corp.)

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in Liz’s ethics statement.

Here’s the statement:

“We can confirm that in order to streamline the product development process, we have reorganized our technical teams into product groups that report into Mark. These groups will be lead by Bret Taylor, Chris Cox, Greg Badros, Mike Schroepfer and Sam Lessin.”

As I wrote last night:

Facebook has done a major corporate reorganization in an effort to be more nimble, sources said.

The new structure integrates design, product and engineering teams around key product areas such as privacy and communication.

We’ll have more details as we get them.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

(Image credit: Flickr user Scr47chy)

Timeline, which is a strikingly divergent redesign of user profile pages, is due “in the coming weeks,” Facebook has said, though people registered as Facebook developers can already try it.

As of last week, Timeline was already being used by 1.1 million people, with 100,000 to 200,000 added per day, according to Lessin’s testimony in the Timelines.com trademark case.

Though Facebook often redesigns its site rather drastically, Timeline is the biggest visual change the company has made so far. The words Lessin used to describe the product are also different; multiple times he brought up the concept of pride.

“Our whole goal here is to help you be proud of your story,” Lessin said. Inspiring pride is an unusually strong and lofty objective for a service that has long called itself a utility.

But two things are inevitable about any Facebook redesign: Many users are likely to strongly dislike it, at least at first; and privacy advocates will protest that it brings personal information into a new light.

Lessin responded to those concerns in our chat, which has been lightly edited and reproduced below:

AllThingsD: So Facebook had the profile, and then it had the wall, but now those two are gone and we’re getting the Timeline. Why?

Sam Lessin: The profile has always been meant to be how you express yourself and the wall was a way to interact. This is the next evolution. While they serve the same functions, Timeline looks very different. But it’s an evolution, not a revolution.

How do you expect people to react to Timeline when they see it on their own Facebook accounts? What features will jump out?

Going down the page, I think people will be excited about having a place to be expressive with the cover photo. It’s not necessarily a groundbreaking feature, but it’s an important one. I also found it to be a pretty emotional experience the first time Timeline was turned on, where you had the ability to look at this content where in the back of your head you always knew was there, but there was no way to see it or access it reasonably. That expressive power is, I think, something that people are going to latch onto.

Obviously the curation controls are pretty powerful, and then other stuff like the map, for instance, it’s a really interesting way to see your own life and to see other people’s lives. For the first time we’re offering a lot of information, which is fascinating, both from applications — what did I listen to the most last month, what articles did I read — plus your own content. We’re offering a new cut that people haven’t seen before.

Do you expect users’ behavior on Facebook to change? Do you expect people to spend more time on their own profile or surfing other people’s profiles?

There’s a lot more to look at on your profile. Historically you kind of knew what was on your profile — it was the job you listed and the last five things you posted. It wasn’t that compelling of an experience. I don’t think there’s going to be any fundamental huge shift, but we’re giving a dimensionality that hasn’t existed before.

In my initial experiences with Timeline, it’s a bit confusing at first because the sidebar navigation scheme has gone away. It feels very different from the rest of Facebook or the Facebook I was used to, and it almost feels like you’re developing off in a different dimension and when I go back to my news feed I’m in a different place.

We want Timeline to feel like your own place. It’s not like we’re off in left field on everything, but there’s no question that it looks and feels pretty different than a lot of the interface. The whole goal with that was to make this feel like it’s yours. We want you to be proud of yourself and tell your story to the right people how you want to tell that story. So yeah, it’s certainly a change, and I think any change is always going to be disorienting. You’re going to remember to click there for friends, instead of the same place you clicked the last 10,000 times. But I also think that’s part of evolving the product.

I’m sure you’ve thought about how to avoid completely disconcerting people when you roll out Timeline. Are you going to let people switch back and forth between the old and the new?

Initially people will be opting in, they’ll be making a choice that this is the interface they want to use. And then once they’ve done that we have this seven-day curation concept [before you publish your Timeline so other people can see it]. Our whole goal here is to help you be proud of your story, so giving people that ability to understand what this is, and play with it themselves, remove things and change privacy, and star the right things.

When is this coming out? Why hasn’t it launched yet — what are you still working on?

We’re rolling this out to developers first, and there’s a lot to interact with and understand. Applications are a huge part of your story.

It might be hard to anticipate, but how do you think people will use Timeline as a private tool versus a public tool?

I think that’s a fascinating question. I, for instance, use my Timeline for private things all the time, as a journal. It’s not necessarily something that I think millions of people will do on day one, but I think it’s a powerful concept. My fiancee certainly sees a very different version of my Timeline than you would, or than someone I don’t know would, and I think that’s great, because it means that you’re telling your story in context to the audience you want.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

But Sittig is now back at the mother ship, having rejoined in January with the title “product architect,” as Kim-Mai Cutler at Inside Facebook reported Friday.

This comes at a time when Facebook has more than 2,000 employees, plans to move to a corporate campus within the next year and says an IPO is likely in 2012. It’s a lot different from when Sittig first joined in 2005.

Sittig had been away from the company only six months before accepting an offer to return. He told NetworkEffect that he felt the outside world lacked the “scale and ambition” of Facebook. Plus, he was lured by some of Facebook’s recent hires: Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, brought in through the acquisitions of their companies Drop.io and Hot Potato, respectively (both of which occurred while Sittig was away).

Here’s Sittig’s explanation:

I left Facebook last June because I’d been there for five years and wanted to see what else I could apply myself to. I didn’t expect at the time that I’d head back.

I spent my time off advising companies and looking for new ideas. But for each idea I wanted to build myself, I kept realizing that Facebook was the only place with the scale and ambition where I could build my ideas successfully.

So that, combined with the steady influx of talented people like Sam Lessin and Justin Shaffer, convinced me to say yes when I was approached with an offer to rejoin.

Prior to Facebook, Sittig worked at Napster, after it bought the Mac client Macster that he had helped develop. He studied philosophy at UC Berkeley. Sittig has made angel investments in companies such as Hearsay, which makes corporate social media management tools.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

BoomTown has always enjoyed–although I have not always agreed with–the ruminations of Fred Wilson in his must-read blog, A VC.

Today, the New York venture investor–heard of Foursquare, Twitter?–penned one that was flatly on point, simply titled “Chasing Returns” about a potential crisis in start-up funding.

It was all due to a new class of investors too focused on chasing returns, noted Wilson, “and some of them do not understand what they are investing in.”

Rut-roh.

Perhaps dumb moneybags are not the greatest worry of our time–but dumber justifications of questionable success certainly should be, which Wilson also called out recently in an article in the New York Observer about the bubbly start-up scene there.

Said Wilson:

“It’s not all going great. You know, companies are failing. A couple of high-flying entrepreneurs came crashing to the ground recently. Justin Shaffer of Hot Potato and Sam Lessin of Drop.io–both of those companies essentially failed. Both of them ended up ‘selling’ their businesses to Facebook, but those were really just–Facebook wanted to hire those people, and they wrapped it up in a ‘sale.’ But those companies were unsuccessful. They failed. So there is failure out there–like, right in front of us. We can see it.”

Many quickly cried foul after Wilson’s remarks, but many more secretly shook their heads in agreement at the reality distortion field around entrepreneurs.

This has happened a lot lately in Silicon Valley, of course–as evidenced by a series of just-in-time saves of once high-flying start-ups (Slide being bought by Google comes to mind) sold as wins.

Indeed, painting failure as another form of success is one of the favorite and endearing canards of tech, showing an ability to bounce back from any negative and pivot into a new direction.

But most pivoting, as Loren Feldman of 1938 Media recently pointed out, is just another word for covering up misdirection.

Perhaps misdirection–as it should be in any world that thrives on innovation and entrepreneurial instincts–is all well and good, but it is only that way as long as it is identified as such when it occurs.

So, good for Wilson for truth-in-labeling when it comes to start-ups, investing and chasing returns these days.

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.

Dave Morin

All three companies make mobile apps (primarily on the iPhone) that allow users to take and immediately share images with friends. It seems kind of simple and mundane, but all these smart people seem to think photo-sharing is the future.

Morin and Path are the most convincing about there being a larger idea behind what they’re doing. San Francisco-based Path is stubbornly focused on close personal connections–a.k.a. real friends.

Unlike every other social site, where there’s an implicit pressure to collect as many friends and followers as you can (and at the same time increase the site’s user numbers), Path is only for the people you really know and trust.

In order to force and foster that kind of sharing, Morin’s team has left out many of the social Web features we’re used to. Users can do only two things on Path: Share photos and view them.

There are no reciprocal friend relationships, no likes or comments, no fun photo-editing filters, no publishing photos to services like Facebook and Flickr, no editing something after you post and no global user search (you have to know the email or phone number for anyone you want to add).

And there are additional restrictions. Users can only ever share with a maximum of 50 people (though they can follow more than 50 people, if invited). Every single post has its own privacy settings–you can share with either only the people tagged in it, or only your share list. If you get sick of someone who’s sharing with you, you can “pause” that person until further notice. Users who don’t have iPhones can view photos on the Web.

The most interesting feature for me is that users see which of their contacts have viewed any one photo. So on Path, you can’t lurk in peace. People know when you’ve seen their posts. This might be a little creepy, but it also could cut down on those annoying awkward conversations that sometimes happen when you’ve seen someone post about something online and then they start telling you about it in person.

Photos are tagged with the location where they’re taken automatically, and users can add people and tags. If someone else takes a picture at that same location, tags that have been previously used near that place recently will be at the top of the list.

The idea is those tags will be used to help users relive their memories stored on the service. So, for instance, someone Morin shares with could retrace his “path” of wine tasting in Napa by zooming in on a map of the pictures he posted from California wine country.

But the thing is, if you want to go try Path (which you’ll be able to do in the U.S. and Canada as of 9 pm PT tonight by going to Apple’s App Store, and in the rest of the world within a few hours), it’s going to seem rather empty at first. You’ll have to seek out friends to share with from scratch–but even worse, nobody will be sharing with you until they decide to add you.

Unlike just about every other social service, Path is not really viral. At all. So even though it’s interesting, its numbers are highly unlikely to correspond favorably to those of competitors like Instagram. And after all, how many mobile photo-sharing apps are you really going to use?

“We really prioritize slow organic growth over hyper-viral growth and going after influencers to build this really steep graph,” said Morin, who formerly helped lead Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect before leaving the company in January. “We are building Path to be a 30-year brand.”

He added, “Many of the photo-sharing apps are photo-blogging apps and popularity contests. On Path, you should always feel comfortable being yourself.”

This antiviral stuff almost seems like overkill, but Morin grounds Path’s feature decisions in the theories of the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar (known for the oft-cited “Dunbar’s Number” of 150 acquaintances, he also proposes that 40-60 people is the outer bound of our personal networks) and Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman (who talked about the difference between experience and memory in a well-received TED Talk on happiness).

If this hyper-personal stuff works, I think Path could potentially create a third major category of social network, distinct from the kind of relationships found on the two current giants, Facebook and Twitter. But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves–and c’mon Dave, you should really let people comment on and like their friends’ photos.

Path was co-founded by Morin, Shawn Fanning and Dustin Mierau, both formerly of Napster. The staff also includes Mallory Paine, who helped engineer the iPhone photo and camera apps for Apple, and Matt Van Horn, who formerly did business development at Digg. Fanning is chairman and landlord of the company but is working on his own other projects day-to-day.

Path has already raised a jumbo seed round with Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund and Betaworks. The company also provided us with an extensive list of individual angel investors: Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Dustin Moskovitz, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, Steve Anderson, Tim Draper, Joi Ito, Fadi Ghandour, Matt Cohler, Sam Lessin, Bill Randuchel, Karl Jacob, Paul Buchheit, Ruchi Sanghvi, John Couch, Michael Parekh, Claudio Chiuchiarelli, Maurice Werdegar, Don Dodge, and Chris Kelly.

The difference here? Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg really, really wanted to work with Drop.io founder Sam Lessin. That’s why Facebook not only gave Lessin’s investors a return on their money, but paid for the deal with Facebook stock instead of cash.

People familiar with the transaction tell me that Drop.io’s investors–primarily DFJ Gotham and RRE Ventures–ended up with something close to double the $10 million they put into the company over the past two years, and that they were paid out in common stock.

At one point in Facebook’s history, that wouldn’t have been remarkable. But as Facebook has shot up in usage, employee size and valuation, its managers have become loath to hand out shares in advance of an IPO.

For instance, after the company bought Hot Potato and founder Justin Shaffer this summer, there was some sotto voce grumbling from investors that only Shaffer received Facebook equity, while his backers got cash.

With the exception of the payment, the Drop.io deal looks very similar. Like Shaffer, Lessin will move from Brooklyn to Palo Alto to work at Facebook headquarters. And like Hot Potato, Drop.io will be shut down.

So what makes Lessin worth precious Facebook shares?

We know that Lessin and Zuckerberg have been tight since they met at Harvard ( Caroline McCarthy has more on that here). Perhaps as important: I’m told that prior to the deal Drop.io had begun work on a new product that was meant to supplant its consumer-facing storage service. (UPDATE: Samuel Clay, via Twitter, suggests that Drop.io was working on a “a wrapper for [content delivery networks]. Auction-style bidding for lowest cost delivery of content.”. That synchs up with what I’ve heard. But if true, not sure it explains Zuckerberg’s interest.)

Love to know more, but Facebook and Lessin are staying mum for now.

I am sure this will be the dumb-as-a-box-of-hammers reasoning this group of Web 2.0 folks gives for this odd video effort, doing a lip-synch romp on their group vacation in Cyprus to Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” and then posting it for all to see on Vimeo.

It is titled: “20 world Internet citizens met in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet.”

Um, kids, here’s a reflection: While you swim in that pricey infinity pool in your luxury villa, Silicon Valley is tanking all over the place. You might want to check your email and see if Sequoia Capital or Ron Conway has cost-cutted you out of a job!

Oh, sorry, BoomTown’s karma is so negative, isn’t I?

But the video gave me flashbacks to heedless-partying-until-the-bomb-fell attitude before the popping of the Web 1.0 bubble. It obviously still burns.

The group rollicking includes Blip.tv’s Mike Hudack, Facebook’s Dave Morin, Drop.io’s Sam Lessin and–well, um, eek, bad idea, awkward!–tech reporter Jessica Vascellaro of The Wall Street Journal.

Here is the video:

UPDATE: Apparently, the makers of the video have made it private on Vimeo and blocked it on YouTube, likely due to the reaction to it, but you can see it here.