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Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Niniane Wang Has Quit Google

Niniane Wang, the Google employee behind Google Desktop and the abruptly-canceled 3D world Lively, in her blog writes that she has quit Google:

Recently I’ve been mulling over whether to blog more about software, since confidentiality is no longer as much of an issue. Many of you know this, but for those who don’t, I decided near the end of 2008 to move on from Google, after five amazing years. It was wonderful working on Desktop (stories) and Gmail and Lively (warm wishes to the hardcore users who worked around the clock to keep the product experience going with newlively.com), and now it is time to try new things.

Back in 2006, Google advertised in Wired with Niniane. The ad said:

Google is looking for engineers with great aspirations. Take Niniane Wang, for example. A co-inventor on 19 patents in various stages of filing, Niniane skipped three grades, learned the Lisp programming language at 10, and started college math classes at 11. At 18, Niniane graduated with a degree in computer science from Caltech (where she also designed a VLSI chip, built an audio recorder out of chips, and discovered she loved writing software).

We’re privileged to have Niniane at Google, but we need more engineers like her

I don’t know why Niniane quit, and also don’t know specifically why Lively was canceled, and it may well be the two items are related. As Lively only had been given 4 months to grow, I wonder if Niniane disagreed with the quick canceling after a project her colleague once (in a blog post Niniane deleted at some time) called the “best project in the world.” Now, Niniane at her blog writes, “At the moment I am traveling and fiddling with a couple of web site ideas.”

Also see the previous interview with Niniane.

[Thanks Tony, via Ionut at Friendfeed!]

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