It has already been 4 years and 8 months since I started working at my current company.

I joined the company with the ambition of turning an entire portal site social. The projects I worked on—such as sharing profiles and social graphs across services, and implementing Japan’s first OpenSocial container for PC—gave me experiences that I likely couldn't have had anywhere else. At the same time, I was also active as a developer evangelist: becoming a Google API Expert for OpenSocial and running the community, becoming a Shindig committer, and organizing SocialWeb Japan. Looking back, I was truly obsessed with the social web over these past few years.

Meanwhile, looking at the industry at large, major Japanese platforms like mixi, Mobage, GREE, and Yahoo! started supporting social apps one after another last year, creating a market that felt like a true gold rush. Overseas, efforts like Facebook Connect, OpenID Connect, and the Distributed SocialWeb have been steadily advancing toward the next step of the social web.

When thinking about my own future direction against this backdrop, I began to question whether I could really do what I wanted to do and do work that would make a broader impact on the world from where I stood. That was right when this opportunity came my way.

Joining Google on June 1st #

** **The position is Developer Advocate—what people often call an evangelist. Moving forward, I will be in a position to advocate for Chrome and HTML5 technologies.

People around me always ask: Why Google? Why not cover the social web? To keep a record for myself, I've summarized my reasons here:

  • Google has strongly championed open web standards and initiatives, including OpenSocial.
  • From my experience being involved as a Google API Expert, I was confident in how appealing Google is as a company.
  • Because it’s a truly global company, I felt I could gain great experience by working with developers all around the world.
  • I found it exciting to be on the front lines advocating for HTML5 and browsers—fundamental technologies that everyone involved with the internet should know about.
  • Browsers and social are going to become inextricably linked going forward. I believed I could play a part in that movement.
  • They agreed to let me work on the social web as part of my 20% time.

There are countless other smaller reasons, but these are the main ones. I feel truly lucky to have been able to make what is, quite literally, the best possible choice for me right now.

What will happen to the communities I run? #

I'd also like to briefly touch upon the communities I've been organizing so far.

For SocialWeb Japan, I intend to continue running it myself as much as possible. We’ve only held five study sessions so far, but topics I want to cover keep piling up every day, so it’s always on my mind. (We are continually looking for staff. If you’re interested, please let me know!)

For Google Buzz API Japan, while I'd love to organize events like hackathons, I'm not sure how much free time I will have, so please let me wait and see how things go for a little while.

As for the OpenSocial API Expert position, I will naturally be stepping down. I plan to recommend another talented person in my place, so if you're thinking "Could that be me?", stay tuned! :)

Many of you might not know about it, but I also plan to continue running EIGOBU, an English study community for developers—partly for my own benefit as well.

In Closing #

I would like to thank all the team members at my previous job who put up with my activities and whims, as well as my family for always supporting me.

In particular, my wife, who got engaged to me when I was working part-time as a professional composer, and who believed in and supported me through all the twists and turns after I entered the web industry—including company acquisitions and job changes—until reaching this milestone of joining Google while raising our child.

I still don't know exactly what the future holds. But I couldn't be more excited to work at Google, and there is no doubt that this will be the biggest turning point of my life.

I look forward to continuing to contribute to making the web in Japan even better.

Eiji Kitamura