Google Wave & Maps Lead Leaves For Facebook

The engineer behind Google Wave and co-founder of the project that later became Google Maps has left the search giant and thrown in with Facebook instead.  Lars Rasmussen confirmed this weekend that he had decided to leave Google, less than two months after the Wave project was axed.  He told SMH that "it feels to me that Facebook may be a sort of once-in-a-decade type of company" and suggested that Wave's demise was because "it takes a while for something new and different to find its footing and I think Google was just not patient."

Meanwhile Facebook's relatively compact team – around 2,000 in comparison to Google's 25,000 – was also a key drive for Rasmussen.  "The energy there is just amazing, whereas it can be very challenging to be working in a company the size of Google" he said, "I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can't operate in an environment like that."

Rasmussen will join several other ex-Google employees now working at Facebook, including Facebook chief technology officer Bret Taylor and platform manager Carl Sjogreen.

[via SMH]