5 ms·

Lars Rasmussen, Father Of Google Maps And Google Wave, Heads To Facebook

93 points by px 16y ago

jdp23 16y ago
Actually according to the article it's not confirmed that he's heading for Facebook. It'll be hard to top Google Wave. I wonder what he'll work on next?
- daviding 16y ago
  Facebook has an email platform / inbox metaphor thing. I bet (i.e. I have no idea what I'm talking about) that he's probably still interested in new forms of collaboration. Maybe under the guise of a Facebook tweak we'll see some Wave concepts reappear. I did always wonder if Wave would be some sort of gmail labs bolt on, and perhaps Facebook is keen on that for their platform...
  - jdp23 16y ago
    It's interesting to think about Facebook cross-fertilizing with Wave but man, hard to believe it would lead to a decent UX.
- robryan 16y ago
  Possibly, if staying in relatively the same area, improving Facebook chat, which is tending to be the default chat people use these days but is lagging behind alternatives. It's only got so big because your friends are already on it and people are already on Facebook.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  > It'll be hard to top Google Wave. How do you mean that ?
  - jdp23 16y ago
    it's hard to come up with another example of something as ambitious, launched with such huge hype (remember the entire developers conference leaping to their feet and applauding) with such atrocious quality and usability. not at all clear what to do for an encore :-)
- naner 16y ago
  It'll be hard to top Google Wave. I wonder what he'll work on next? Maybe he'll integrate Google Wave into Facebook? Well one can dream...
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
netaustin 16y ago
Who knows what he'll work on at Facebook? Maps and Wave are kind of unrelated, conceptually. Facebook could use him for something related to geolocation for Places, or they could want him to lead some inbox/chat integration project. Maybe they want him to revamp their photo uploader. He's a programmer, not a collaboration guru; surely they've got 100s of ideas that could use his massive brains.
swah 16y ago
These days, do you guys feel like Google and Facebook are equally cool places to work on innovative and world-changing projects with other smart folks?
- garply 16y ago
  No. A lot of my former classmates from Stanford work at Google and Facebook. Among the engineers, there is a pretty clear trend that the more hacker-like ones are at Google (or Microsoft Research) and the more financially-motivated ones (primarily concerned with prestige, nice car, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry) are at Facebook. Maybe it's just that the latter couldn't get into the former company, I'm not sure. Among the non-engineers (human resources, etc), the employees that I know look a lot more similar.
  - shazow 16y ago
    I don't have many friends at Facebook, but my several friends at Google are all plenty concerned with nice cars, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry.
    - kaens 16y ago
      Are any of them primarily motivated to write software by profit potential?
      - shazow 16y ago
        Some. Hard to judge, but I guess hopping around between jobs for the best salary/perks is a sign. Google does a thorough job placing monetary incentives on heroic effort. Not sure if those avenues are ever targeted by these people though.
  - random42 16y ago
    Which kinda makes sense, given Facebook is pre-IPO.
    - 16y ago
charlief 16y ago
Well now that Lars is gone, the possibility of a complete revision and UX revamp of Wave has gone up.
- swombat 16y ago
  Why is that?
  - charlief 16y ago
    If I had to guess, most of the revamped UX will come in their Wave in a Box project[1]. What we know: a. Lars and his brother Jens have been a team or working colleagues for at least a while (maybe since 1999)[2]. They co-founded Where 2 Technologies in 2003 which got acquired by Google in 2004 and became the core for Google Maps. b. A big proportion of the Google Wave complaints surrounded the UX, both for end-users and devs. c. Lars on Wave "On the team after a year and a half, when we started using it, it still took us a while on how to use it... how to be more productive using it." [3] The whole video is a good watch for those interested, and so you get the context of the quote as well. We can gather that Google Wave germinated from a very organic process including the UX. d. Google's Wave in a Box project will include a subset of the functionality (simplification) of Google Wave. "This (Wave in a Box) project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware"[1] What I think but really do not know and I suck at writing: * With Lars leaving, it adds liquidity to the possibility of further change on Google Wave development or integration. It makes it pretty certain that the leadership on the project, Wave in a Box, or subsequent integration projects will at least be tweaked. This will be further confirmed if Jens leaves as well (a), but we have no idea at this point if he will. * Losing Lars maybe Jens maybe others and they will lose a big whack of their engineering leadership on Wave, so you can expect further developments on the core technology to slow tremendously. What's left is the community building, repackaging, marketing, open-source, maybe some hope in monetization, some more experimentation, package and publish extensible protocols[4], maybe trying an adoption experiment (Wave in a Box, maybe enterprises will use it!!!, let's fight Outlook), maybe some hope in leveraging the existing technologies with integration, etc. Google Wave's team is probably focused just on that, and the head caveat on those tasks is the UX. They'll probably bring in or already have some outstanding UX folks. Maybe the leadership on that front wasn't there from the start, but we don't know as it was created in a very organic fashion (c). * Google is a master at integration in most cases. Just look back at all the acquisitions that went really well, and on top of that, Wave is using most of the Google ecosystem already. While the Wave in a Box project continues, you can probably expect some Google Wave functionality and technology to pop up here and there. I wouldn't be surprised if it makes an incremental and subtle appearance in some of GMail's functionality in the way Buzz has, but we don't know. * Most of us would agree that Google Wave won't be coming back in its current form because the tarnished reputation. Such an event is more unlikely than finding a black swan, more like finding a transparent swan who can do calculus, but even finding one of those can happen. It will be interesting to see what happens with Wave in a Box, Google Wave Federation Protocol, and Google's ecosystem, hopefully good things. [1] http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-steps-wave-in-box.html http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n... [2] http://au.linkedin.com/pub/lars-rasmussen/5/519/16 http://au.linkedin.com/pub/lars-rasmussen/5/519/16 http://au.linkedin.com/pub/jens-eilstrup-rasmussen/5/192/890 http://au.linkedin.com/pub/jens-eilstrup-rasmussen/5/192/890 [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl1_MmnhJpA#t=2m32s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl1_MmnhJpA#t=2m32s [4] http://www.waveprotocol.org/ http://www.waveprotocol.org/
yanw 16y ago
Should they have kept Wave alive to keep him? I think that these supposedly high profile departures might not be such a bad thing for Google, they might find a new Lars in their ranks that won't cost as much to retain (until she/he hits gold).
- 0-4 16y ago
  Why would you want to go out of your way to keep someone who was responsible for wave?

93 points by px 16y ago

jdp23 16y ago

Actually according to the article it's not confirmed that he's heading for Facebook. It'll be hard to top Google Wave. I wonder what he'll work on next?

daviding 16y ago
Facebook has an email platform / inbox metaphor thing. I bet (i.e. I have no idea what I'm talking about) that he's probably still interested in new forms of collaboration. Maybe under the guise of a Facebook tweak we'll see some Wave concepts reappear. I did always wonder if Wave would be some sort of gmail labs bolt on, and perhaps Facebook is keen on that for their platform...
- jdp23 16y ago
  It's interesting to think about Facebook cross-fertilizing with Wave but man, hard to believe it would lead to a decent UX.
robryan 16y ago
Possibly, if staying in relatively the same area, improving Facebook chat, which is tending to be the default chat people use these days but is lagging behind alternatives. It's only got so big because your friends are already on it and people are already on Facebook.
jacquesm 16y ago
> It'll be hard to top Google Wave. How do you mean that ?
- jdp23 16y ago
  it's hard to come up with another example of something as ambitious, launched with such huge hype (remember the entire developers conference leaping to their feet and applauding) with such atrocious quality and usability. not at all clear what to do for an encore :-)
naner 16y ago
It'll be hard to top Google Wave. I wonder what he'll work on next? Maybe he'll integrate Google Wave into Facebook? Well one can dream...

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

netaustin 16y ago

Who knows what he'll work on at Facebook? Maps and Wave are kind of unrelated, conceptually. Facebook could use him for something related to geolocation for Places, or they could want him to lead some inbox/chat integration project. Maybe they want him to revamp their photo uploader. He's a programmer, not a collaboration guru; surely they've got 100s of ideas that could use his massive brains.

swah 16y ago

These days, do you guys feel like Google and Facebook are equally cool places to work on innovative and world-changing projects with other smart folks?

garply 16y ago
No. A lot of my former classmates from Stanford work at Google and Facebook. Among the engineers, there is a pretty clear trend that the more hacker-like ones are at Google (or Microsoft Research) and the more financially-motivated ones (primarily concerned with prestige, nice car, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry) are at Facebook. Maybe it's just that the latter couldn't get into the former company, I'm not sure. Among the non-engineers (human resources, etc), the employees that I know look a lot more similar.
- shazow 16y ago
  I don't have many friends at Facebook, but my several friends at Google are all plenty concerned with nice cars, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry.
  - kaens 16y ago
    Are any of them primarily motivated to write software by profit potential?
    - shazow 16y ago
      Some. Hard to judge, but I guess hopping around between jobs for the best salary/perks is a sign. Google does a thorough job placing monetary incentives on heroic effort. Not sure if those avenues are ever targeted by these people though.
- random42 16y ago
  Which kinda makes sense, given Facebook is pre-IPO.
  - 16y ago

charlief 16y ago

Well now that Lars is gone, the possibility of a complete revision and UX revamp of Wave has gone up.

swombat 16y ago
Why is that?
- charlief 16y ago
  If I had to guess, most of the revamped UX will come in their Wave in a Box project[1]. What we know: a. Lars and his brother Jens have been a team or working colleagues for at least a while (maybe since 1999)[2]. They co-founded Where 2 Technologies in 2003 which got acquired by Google in 2004 and became the core for Google Maps. b. A big proportion of the Google Wave complaints surrounded the UX, both for end-users and devs. c. Lars on Wave "On the team after a year and a half, when we started using it, it still took us a while on how to use it... how to be more productive using it." [3] The whole video is a good watch for those interested, and so you get the context of the quote as well. We can gather that Google Wave germinated from a very organic process including the UX. d. Google's Wave in a Box project will include a subset of the functionality (simplification) of Google Wave. "This (Wave in a Box) project will not have the full functionality of Google Wave as you know it today. However, we intend to give developers and enterprising users an opportunity to run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware"[1] What I think but really do not know and I suck at writing: * With Lars leaving, it adds liquidity to the possibility of further change on Google Wave development or integration. It makes it pretty certain that the leadership on the project, Wave in a Box, or subsequent integration projects will at least be tweaked. This will be further confirmed if Jens leaves as well (a), but we have no idea at this point if he will. * Losing Lars maybe Jens maybe others and they will lose a big whack of their engineering leadership on Wave, so you can expect further developments on the core technology to slow tremendously. What's left is the community building, repackaging, marketing, open-source, maybe some hope in monetization, some more experimentation, package and publish extensible protocols[4], maybe trying an adoption experiment (Wave in a Box, maybe enterprises will use it!!!, let's fight Outlook), maybe some hope in leveraging the existing technologies with integration, etc. Google Wave's team is probably focused just on that, and the head caveat on those tasks is the UX. They'll probably bring in or already have some outstanding UX folks. Maybe the leadership on that front wasn't there from the start, but we don't know as it was created in a very organic fashion (c). * Google is a master at integration in most cases. Just look back at all the acquisitions that went really well, and on top of that, Wave is using most of the Google ecosystem already. While the Wave in a Box project continues, you can probably expect some Google Wave functionality and technology to pop up here and there. I wouldn't be surprised if it makes an incremental and subtle appearance in some of GMail's functionality in the way Buzz has, but we don't know. * Most of us would agree that Google Wave won't be coming back in its current form because the tarnished reputation. Such an event is more unlikely than finding a black swan, more like finding a transparent swan who can do calculus, but even finding one of those can happen. It will be interesting to see what happens with Wave in a Box, Google Wave Federation Protocol, and Google's ecosystem, hopefully good things. [1] http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-next-steps-wave-in-box.html http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n... [2] http://au.linkedin.com/pub/lars-rasmussen/5/519/16 http://au.linkedin.com/pub/lars-rasmussen/5/519/16 http://au.linkedin.com/pub/jens-eilstrup-rasmussen/5/192/890 http://au.linkedin.com/pub/jens-eilstrup-rasmussen/5/192/890 [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl1_MmnhJpA#t=2m32s http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl1_MmnhJpA#t=2m32s [4] http://www.waveprotocol.org/ http://www.waveprotocol.org/

yanw 16y ago

Should they have kept Wave alive to keep him? I think that these supposedly high profile departures might not be such a bad thing for Google, they might find a new Lars in their ranks that won't cost as much to retain (until she/he hits gold).

0-4 16y ago
Why would you want to go out of your way to keep someone who was responsible for wave?