Owen Van Natta, the former operations and revenue boss at Facebook, is now chief executive at his former social-networking rival, MySpace.

The appointment was announced Friday and follows MySpace parent News Corp.'s decision the previous day to lay off Chris DeWolfe, the sites co-founder.

Van Natta, 39, has earned high praise for keeping Facebook running amid its recently explosive growth and for managing business development at Amazon.com, prior to Facebook.

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