The open standards evangelist has left the company to focus on smaller projects

Jun 23, 2009 07:36 GMT  ·  By
The Open Standards Evangelist Kevin Marks has left the company to focus on smaller projects
   The Open Standards Evangelist Kevin Marks has left the company to focus on smaller projects

Kevin Marks, one of the best known names at Google when it comes to social media, has decided to leave the company after working on some of Google's most interesting products in the field. He was also a technology evangelist for the company with the official title of Developer Advocate.

“I'm no longer working for Google. I had an interesting time there and worked on lots of fascinating projects with great colleagues,” Marks wrote on his blog. “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.”

He also worked on many other projects, including Google Profiles and Microformats, but, lately, most of his work was on promoting open standards and Google social networking products. And, while the projects he worked on may not be recognizable by the public, their effects are. OpenSocial, for example, laid the groundwork for portable social networking apps by providing a common development platform. A developer creating for this platform would be guaranteed that their apps would work on any social network supporting OpenSocial without too much changes to the code.

Marks was employed by many top companies before Google, like the BBC, Technorati and Apple, and will continue to work with the open web standard groups he is currently collaborating with. However, a move to another big company is unlikely, as he believes that it's time he started working on something smaller. “Over the last two years, we have built out the infrastructure for the social Web. Now it is time to build things on that infrastructure,” he told TechCrunch.