Google Wave Creator Quits, Joins Facebook

srimadman found an interview with Wave creator Lars Rasmussen where he talks about his recent decision to join Facebook, leaving Google behind. Apparently getting personally pitched by Zuckerberg helped. He says, "I've got a job description of 'come hang out with us for a while and we'll see what happens,' which is a pretty exciting thing." The article talks about Big vs Small companies, and notes that about 20% of Facebook's staff are former Googlers.

Re:You got Google Wave on my Facebook!

[Game_Ender]

This is the guy that made google-maps as well, it is quite a loss.

Re:Google What Now?

[AnonymousClown]

Google's version of Facebook - only they put a "business" spin on it.

Re:Google What Now?

[Enderandrew]

Email + IM/Chat + Wiki Functionality all rolled into one.

The best part of being at Facebook?

[Anonymous Coward]

We get to do evil now! Yeah!

Re:Google What Now?

[hodet]

From the demo I saw (I never actually tried it), it looked to me like an online collaboration tool for groups. You could chat with the whole group, launch shared screens for collaboration etc etc. You could add and remove users from the wave as you go. It tried to blend all kinds of things into one platform hosted on a central server. Google were never really able to convince people why they need this tool (myself included). I remember after looking at the demo, thinking how painful it might have been to actually use in the real world.

Re:Google What Now?

[tapo]

"Real-time message board for projects."

A few friends of mine have been using Wave for developing a game and game toolset, and its a weird mixture of wiki, message board, and group whiteboard, they usually discuss the latest project milestone on Skype while having running meeting minutes in a Wave. If someone can't make the meeting, they come along later and comment. There's long waves about everything from programming standards, to models and art assets, to release notes.

It's been so damn useful for project development that Google is planning to ship "Wave in a Box" so small teams like ours can deploy it on our own server, even after Google kills official support. And we will, we can't go back to wiki, it seems so damn archaic at this point.

Re:new boss, same as the old boss

[definate]

I just use a pseudonym, based on a famous person with a similar name. People can tag me all they want. I also lock down the profile so that no applications can access my data, and I don't keep any personal data on there. I lastly have different privileges for different groups of people, some don't get access to any tagged photos, photos I upload, or wall posts. No one gets to see which friends I have, that they don't also have.

I just use it more as a way to keep in contact with certain friends.

There's ways of locking it down, and this helps.

Re:Ok, I'll be the dumb one.

[jimicus]

"Look at what I can do, Gran!"

"That's nice, dear".

Re:Google What Now?

[bhartman34]

Wave is (since it's still operable until the end of the year) a real-time collaboration tool. It has elements of wikis, e-mail, and even chat capabilities that hearkened back to Unix talk. It's got about as much in common with Facebook as Gmail does.

Buzz is probably a closer fit to Facebook than it is to Twitter. Twitter is kind of limited (e.g., to 140 characters), and Buzz is a good deal richer.

Re:You got Google Wave on my Facebook!

[shutdown -p now]

Just look at the dominant languages in Google: not C++ or C. Not serious languages.

Um, ever heard of Google's implementation of MapReduce? Given that it underlies their search, which is still the cornerstone of their business, I don't know how more dominant it can get.

As for the web apps part of it - why would anyone sane use C++ rather than Java for those?

And what the hell is a "serious language", anyway? According to your definition, it's either C or C++. I guess this means that there were no "serious languages" before 1972.