14 DAY TRIAL // Google always tries to attract the best people in the business on its side to maintain its advantage over the competition, so, when Kevin Marks left in June, another promising person was bound to join the company. It is currently the case of Joseph Smarr.
According to his personal blog, the newest addition to the Mountain View team will “help drive a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web,” which seems like a realistic thing to say taking into consideration that he had been working on similar projects for Plaxo for almost eight years. Furthermore, Smarr was among the first non-founders to join this organization and helped increase its reputation and productivity to the extent that it was bought for $150 million by Comcast. He also became Plaxo’s Chief Technology Officer.
Contributing to the rise of Plaxo has also helped Smarr get numerous connections all over the social web and has given him the chance to advocate for open standards, just like Marks had done. In addition, he has already gotten in contact with Google working as partners for several projects during the last years. “Like all incoming Google engineers, my official title for the first year will be ‘member of technical staff,’” Smarr said. “The work is on turbocharging the opening up of the social web,” he added. For the moment, he will be reporting to an engineering director, David Glazer.
Needless to say, Smarr is highly enthusiastic about his new career change especially due to the technologies that were created by Google for bringing more dynamism to the web. He is also reported to appreciate the company's commitment to open standards like OpenSocial, OpenID or OAuth.
In all fairness, it should be mentioned that Google has not succeeded in entering the top social platforms over the Internet so far, and this can be explained by the fact that it deals with a wide range of services. The same cannot be said of Facebook, which is going through the opposite process: it has focused on social networking for so long and it now wants to extend its areas. For example, Google Friend Connect, an essential component of OpenSocial, has not gained the popularity of Facebook Connect, but the California company has not given up trying to make it a successful project. After having improved the service, it has also integrated Twitter to help it gain members.
On related news, Facebook has also recently hired a very competent person in the field of the open web in the person of Dave Recordon. Just like Smarr, he is also well-connected and they seem to share the same line of interests, thus it will be interesting to monitor their progress and their achievements for their current employers.