Farewell to Google

I'm no longer working for Google. I had an interesting time there and worked on lots of fascinating projects with great colleagues, so this is a small look back at some of them.

My first taste of Google was to work on orkut, before starting the project now known as Google Profiles, which was first launched in Google Maps, and is now seen across Google and the wider web. I then worked on the engineering side of OpenSocial, before its launch. Realising that Google had thousands of engineers, but very few comfortable speaking in public, I became a Developer Advocate, working to bridge external and internal developers, explaining the Social web to Google and OpenSocial and more to the wider web community.

I've spent most of my time working on building and promoting open web standards, both inside the company and out. I helped launch the Social Graph API, promoted OAuth and OpenID, helped converge Portable Contacts with OpenSocial, and explained how the Open Stack fits together. I helped promote Microformats within Google and without and am very pleased to see them showing up in Rich Snippets in search. The Activity Streams effort continues this web-wide work to build social infrastructure to make the web more social.

I'll still be working on web standards through the groups above, the Open Web Foundation, the Open Rights Group, and more. Professionally, I'll be coding, writing and speaking on the social web via several new projects. I hope to see many of you this week when I'm talking to the SFAMA on Thursday night, and hosting the Microformats 4th Birthday party on Friday.

If you want to get hold of me, I'm kevinmarks on most social networks, domains and of course Twitter. Or just google me.