AOL Inc. hired former Yahoo Inc. executive Brad Garlinghouse as president of its communications group, responsible for its email and instant-messaging services.
Tuesday's appointment fills the last open position on AOL's executive team under new CEO Tim Armstrong and comes as the Internet company prepares for its spinoff from parent Time Warner Inc. this year.
Mr. Garlinghouse, 38 years old, worked at Yahoo for almost six years, most recently as senior vice president of communications and communities, where he was responsible for overseeing Yahoo's email and instant-messaging services.
He is known for writing a widely circulated memo in 2006, dubbed "The Peanut Butter Manifesto," that said Yahoo was spreading itself too thin and called for a massive reorganization. Mr. Garlinghouse left Yahoo in 2008 and most recently worked as a senior adviser at investment group Silver Lake Partners.At AOL, Mr. Garlinghouse also will be responsible for expanding the company's Silicon Valley operations and West Coast new-ventures business, which houses fledgling projects and acquisitions such as social-networking site Bebo, which AOL acquired for $850 million last year.
Mr. Garlinghouse joins AOL at a tumultuous time. Mr. Armstrong was hired in April to revive the company, which is struggling to make a transition from its roots as a subscription-based service for connecting to the Internet to an ad-supported digital-media company.
Internet users are abandoning AOL's email and instant-messaging services at a rapid pace. Traffic to AOL's email service, which lags behind Yahoo's, Microsoft Corp.'s and Google Inc.'s, fell 19% in July from a year earlier, to 36.4 million unique U.S. visitors, according to comScore Inc.
