In the Republican Party's ongoing struggle to build an online political machine to rival the formidable new media operation fielded by Barack Obama in 2008, many conservatives pinned their hopes on Cyrus Krohn, the 38-year-old alumnus of Microsoft and Yahoo who was heading up the Republican National Committee's e-campaign efforts.

Admirers pointed to innovations like inviting Internet users to help draft the party's platform, and credit Krohn with growing the GOP's e-mail list to more than 12 million addresses from less than 2 million. He is also credited with building a Republican presence on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and with helping to orchestrate the first RNC Tech Summit last month. In January, Red State founder Erick Erickson called him the party's "indispensable man." On Thursday, he handed in his resignation.

Krohn announced his departure in a blog post (and accompanying tweet, of course) on the site of the e-Voter Institute, titled "RNC-YA." Though he opens with a fierce blast at "the blog-flogging of political simpletons" who doubt the party's ability to recover the lead online, he also laments the paucity of serious coders—as opposed to blog pundits and Twitter activists—working to build tools and platforms for the GOP. "Maybe," he offers, "we should start providing computer science scholarships in exchange for a commitment to serve our party?"

Krohn—who came aboard during the tenure of former RNC Chair Mike "do it in the Facebook" Duncan—was seen as a potential casualty of the flux following the ascension of newly-minted chair Michael Steele. Red State's Erickson warned that the McCain campaign diaspora had unleashed a horde of staffers eager to "oust Cyrus and take over the technology he has started building." Erickson became one of Krohn's most vocal boosters:

In my post, I discussed who Cyrus Krohn is and why keeping him at the RNC is important. Since then, all the thinking we have done at RedState over endorsements, etc. has come down to one this: will Cyrus be kept at the RNC. He is that important. We will know whether Michael Steele is serious about bringing change to the party by, ironically enough, whether he brings change to the e-Director’s position. Change in that position will most likely mean he was not serious about change at all.

Krohn himself joined a Facebook campaign devoted to urging Steele to keep him on. Now, amid growing conservative criticism of Steele's leadership and a week after the resignation of the RNC's finance director, Krohn is headed back to Seattle—apparently without an immediate job lined up. We're hearing conflicting things about what actually went down, but the consensus online appears to be that this loss is a serious setback to the party's tech efforts.

For the moment, e-campaign queries to the RNC are being directed to Krohn protege Todd Van Etten.