Ben Darnell, a key member of the Google Reader team, has left Mountain View to jump into startup life. Darnell bailed Google for FriendFeed, which was founded by ex-Googlers and notably in part by Kevin Fox, who used to work with him on the Google Reader team.
Darnell is FriendFeed’s first hire in over a year, and will get employee badge number 13. He starts today, and according to the blog post announcing the steal, he’ll be bringing his “ninja-fu data-storage and scalability skills” to the startup.
I was reading Darnell’s blog and I noticed something funny: back in May, he blogged about his experiences playing around with Google App Engine and coming up with FriendFork. The latter is a quick product mashed together to make it easier to consume, indeed, FriendFeed in Google Reader.
(Hat tip to @OurielOhayon)
Good luck, Ben!!!
Hope to see some great work rolling out from you, at FriendFeed too.
Cheerz
good news for goog reader users. they were not doing anything. we would have definitely liked some “lab” features. Instead they are trying to monetize their monopoly by adding “likes” on top of blog post itself. man, like first or content first?
maybe they’ll come up with something more groundbreaking than friendfeed. FF is a great service, but it’s not for everyone. it’s mainly for well connected geeks who have more than 3 social streams. it’s technologically far superior than twitter, but the average joes of the world like twitter’s simplicity.
Good luck!
I believe the simpler service which connects more than 3 social streams unfortunately now is Facebook.
so much top talent being wasted on friendfeed
talent is never wasted. were they better off being google’s code monkeys?
only if google is making something good
Lately this things are not surprising anymore. A lot of people is leaving google for some reason.
I think new ideas are harder to sell when you have to sell those to a company targeting a global audience. Google tries to be everything to everyone.
look forward to seeing new features on FriendFeed
Google will eventually buy FriendFeed so Ben will come full circle again.
Wow. An engineer left a tech company to join another tech company. Stunning news!
For reals.
friendfeed…the absolute coolest service that nobody uses
å‚»B
Awesome! Way to go Ben!
Left Mountain View? FriendFeed is located in Mountain View too, right?